A planar magneto-inductive lens for three-dimensional subwavelength imaging

A planar near-field magnetoinductive lens operating in the microwave range is presented. The proposed device consists of two parallel planar arrays of metallic broadside coupled (BC-) split ring resonators (SRRs), or BC-SRRs. Power coming from a point-like source located in front of the lens is focused into a receiver located in free space behind the device. This focus is clearly removed from the back side of the lens, and has a size which is an order of magnitude smaller than the free space wavelength of the incoming radiation. The imaging properties of the device mainly relies on the excitation of magnetoinductive surface waves on the BC-SRR arrays. By simply scaling the BC-SRRs size, as well as the arrays periodicity, the frequency of operation of the device can be tuned over a wide frequency range. Thus the proposed design is potentially useful for many applications ranging from megahertzs to terahertzs.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Applied Physics Letter

Otolith morphology of Nezumia sclerorhynchus and Nezumia aequalis (Macrouridae): a useful tool to species identification and ecological studies

Bol. Mus. Mun. Funchal, Sup. N.º 6: 205-212, 2001Otoliths of Nezumia sclerorhynchus and N. aequalis are described and compared. When studying the marine trophic relationships, its general shape and morphometry allows one to separated these two sympatric species.São descritos e comparados os otólitos sagitta de Nezumia sclerorhynchus e de N. aequalis. No estudo das relações tróficas marinhas a sua forma e morfometria permitem distinguir qual destas duas espécies simpátricas foi predada

Effective Lower Bounding Techniques for Pseudo-Boolean Optimization

Linear Pseudo-Boolean Optimization (PBO) is a widely used modeling framework in Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Due to significant advances in Boolean Satisfiability (SAT), new algorithms for PBO have emerged, which are effective on highly constrained instances. However, these algorithms fail to handle effectively the information provided by the cost function of PBO. This paper addresses the integration of lower bound estimation methods with SAT-related techniques in PBO solvers. Moreover, the paper shows that the utilization of lower bound estimates can dramatically improve the overall performance of PBO solvers for most existing benchmarks from EDA. 1

Hawking radiation for non asymptotically flat dilatonic black holes using gravitational anomaly

The $d$-dimensional scalar field action may be reduced, in the background geometry of a black hole, to a 2-dimensional effective action. In the near horizon region, it appears a gravitational anomaly: the energy-momentum tensor of the scalar field is not conserved anymore. This anomaly is removed by introducing a term related to the Hawking temperature of the black hole. Even if the temperature term introduced is not covariant, a gauge transformation may restore the covariance. We apply this method to compute the temperature of the black hole of the dilatonic non asymptotically flat black holes. We compare the results with those obtained through other methods.Comment: Latex file, 22 pages. Some discussions enlarged. New references. Accepted for publication in the European Physical Journal

On Computing Minimum Unsatisfiable Cores

Certifying the correctness of a SAT solver is straightforward for satisfiable instances of SAT. Given

Satisfiability-Based Algorithms for Boolean Optimization

This paper proposes new algorithms for the Binate Covering Problem (BCP), a well-known restriction of Boolean Optimization. Binate Covering finds application in many areas of Computer Science and Engineering. In Artificial Intelligence, BCP can be used for computing minimum-size prime implicants of Boolean functions, of interest in Automated Reasoning and Non-Monotonic Reasoning. Moreover, Binate Covering is an essential modeling tool in Electronic Design Automation. The objectives of the paper are to briefly review branch-and-bound algorithms for BCP, to describe how to apply backtrack search pruning techniques from the Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) domain to BCP, and to illustrate how to strengthen those pruning techniques by exploiting the actual formulation of BCP. Experimental results, obtained on representative instances indicate that the proposed techniques provide significant performance gains for a large number of problem instances