The Equilibrium Shape of Quantum Dots

The formation of dislocation-free three-dimensional islands during the heteroepitaxial growth of lattice-mismatched materials has been observed experimentally for several material systems. The equilibrium shape of the islands is governed by the competition between the surface energy and the elastic relaxation energy of the islands as compared to the uniform strained film. As an exemplification we consider the experimentally intensively investigated growth of InAs quantum dots on a GaAs(001) substrate, deriving the equilibrium shape as a function of island volume. For this purpose InAs surface energies have been calculated within density-functional theory, and a continuum approach has been applied to compute the elastic relaxation energies.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures. Submitted to Nuovo Cimento (November 27, 1996)

Tex2Shape: Detailed Full Human Body Geometry From a Single Image

We present a simple yet effective method to infer detailed full human body shape from only a single photograph. Our model can infer full-body shape including face, hair, and clothing including wrinkles at interactive frame-rates. Results feature details even on parts that are occluded in the input image. Our main idea is to turn shape regression into an aligned image-to-image translation problem. The input to our method is a partial texture map of the visible region obtained from off-the-shelf methods. From a partial texture, we estimate detailed normal and vector displacement maps, which can be applied to a low-resolution smooth body model to add detail and clothing. Despite being trained purely with synthetic data, our model generalizes well to real-world photographs. Numerous results demonstrate the versatility and robustness of our method

Learning to Reconstruct People in Clothing from a Single RGB Camera

We present a learning-based model to infer the personalized 3D shape of people from a few frames (1-8) of a monocular video in which the person is moving, in less than 10 seconds with a reconstruction accuracy of 5mm. Our model learns to predict the parameters of a statistical body model and instance displacements that add clothing and hair to the shape. The model achieves fast and accurate predictions based on two key design choices. First, by predicting shape in a canonical T-pose space, the network learns to encode the images of the person into pose-invariant latent codes, where the information is fused. Second, based on the observation that feed-forward predictions are fast but do not always align with the input images, we predict using both, bottom-up and top-down streams (one per view) allowing information to flow in both directions. Learning relies only on synthetic 3D data. Once learned, the model can take a variable number of frames as input, and is able to reconstruct shapes even from a single image with an accuracy of 6mm. Results on 3 different datasets demonstrate the efficacy and accuracy of our approach

Development of a scanning electron mirror microscope

Scanning electron mirrors microscope design and developmen

Label-free microfluidic enrichment of ring-stage Plasmodium falciparum-infected red blood cells using non-inertial hydrodynamic lift

<b>Background</b> Understanding of malaria pathogenesis caused by Plasmodium falciparum has been greatly deepened since the introduction of in vitro culture system, but the lack of a method to enrich ring-stage parasites remains a technical challenge. Here, a novel way to enrich red blood cells containing parasites in the early ring stage is described and demonstrated.<p></p> <b>Methods</b> A simple, straight polydimethylsiloxane microchannel connected to two syringe pumps for sample injection and two height reservoirs for sample collection is used to enrich red blood cells containing parasites in the early ring stage (8-10 h p.i.). The separation is based on the non-inertial hydrodynamic lift effect, a repulsive cell-wall interaction that enables continuous and label-free separation with deformability as intrinsic marker.<p></p> <b>Results</b> The possibility to enrich red blood cells containing P. falciparum parasites at ring stage with a throughput of ~12,000 cells per hour and an average enrichment factor of 4.3 ± 0.5 is demonstrated.<p></p> <b>Conclusion</b> The method allows for the enrichment of red blood cells early after the invasion by P. falciparumparasites continuously and without any need to label the cells. The approach promises new possibilities to increase the sensitivity of downstream analyses like genomic- or diagnostic tests. The device can be produced as a cheap, disposable chip with mass production technologies and works without expensive peripheral equipment. This makes the approach interesting for the development of new devices for field use in resource poor settings and environments, e.g. with the aim to increase the sensitivity of microscope malaria diagnosis.<p></p&gt

The Cauchy-Schlomilch transformation

The Cauchy-Schl\"omilch transformation states that for a function $f$ and $a, \, b > 0$, the integral of $f(x^{2})$ and $af((ax-bx^{-1})^{2}$ over the interval $[0, \infty)$ are the same. This elementary result is used to evaluate many non-elementary definite integrals, most of which cannot be obtained by symbolic packages. Applications to probability distributions is also given

Telluric correction in the near-infrared: Standard star or synthetic transmission?

Context. The atmospheric absorption of the Earth is an important limiting factor for ground-based spectroscopic observations and the near-infrared and infrared regions are the most affected. Several software packages that produce a synthetic atmospheric transmission spectrum have been developed to correct for the telluric absorption; these are Molecfit, TelFit, and TAPAS. Aims. Our goal is to compare the correction achieved using these three telluric correction packages and the division by a telluric standard star. We want to evaluate the best method to correct near-infrared high-resolution spectra as well as the limitations of each software package and methodology. Methods. We applied the telluric correction methods to CRIRES archival data taken in the J and K bands. We explored how the achieved correction level varies depending on the atmospheric T-P profile used in the modelling, the depth of the atmospheric lines, and the molecules creating the absorption. Results. We found that the Molecfit and TelFit corrections lead to smaller residuals for the water lines. The standard star method corrects best the oxygen lines. The Molecfit package and the standard star method corrections result in global offsets always below 0.5% for all lines; the offset is similar with TelFit and TAPAS for the H2O lines and around 1% for the O2 lines. All methods and software packages result in a scatter between 3% and 7% inside the telluric lines. The use of a tailored atmospheric profile for the observatory leads to a scatter two times smaller, and the correction level improves with lower values of precipitable water vapour. Conclusions. The synthetic transmission methods lead to an improved correction compared to the standard star method for the water lines in the J band with no loss of telescope time, but the oxygen lines were better corrected by the standard star method.Comment: 18 pages, 13 figures, Accepted to A&

Mode mixing in asymmetric double trench photonic crystal waveguides

e investigate both experimentally and theoretically the waveguiding properties of a novel double trench waveguide where a conventional single-mode strip waveguide is embedded in a two dimensional photonic crystal (PhC) slab formed in silicon on insulator (SOI) wafers. We demonstrate that the bandwidth for relatively low-loss (50dB/cm) waveguiding is significantly expanded to 250nm covering almost all the photonic band gap owing to nearly linear dispersion of the TE-like waveguiding mode. The flat transmission spectrum however is interrupted by numerous narrow stop bands. We found that these stop bands can be attributed to anti-crossing between TE-like (positive parity) and TM-like (negative parity) modes. This effect is a direct result of the strong asymmetry of the waveguides that have an upper cladding of air and lower cladding of oxide. To our knowledge this is the first demonstration of the effects of cladding asymmetry on the transmission characteristics of the PhC slab waveguides.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Learning to Dress {3D} People in Generative Clothing

Three-dimensional human body models are widely used in the analysis of human pose and motion. Existing models, however, are learned from minimally-clothed 3D scans and thus do not generalize to the complexity of dressed people in common images and videos. Additionally, current models lack the expressive power needed to represent the complex non-linear geometry of pose-dependent clothing shapes. To address this, we learn a generative 3D mesh model of clothed people from 3D scans with varying pose and clothing. Specifically, we train a conditional Mesh-VAE-GAN to learn the clothing deformation from the SMPL body model, making clothing an additional term in SMPL. Our model is conditioned on both pose and clothing type, giving the ability to draw samples of clothing to dress different body shapes in a variety of styles and poses. To preserve wrinkle detail, our Mesh-VAE-GAN extends patchwise discriminators to 3D meshes. Our model, named CAPE, represents global shape and fine local structure, effectively extending the SMPL body model to clothing. To our knowledge, this is the first generative model that directly dresses 3D human body meshes and generalizes to different poses. The model, code and data are available for research purposes at https://cape.is.tue.mpg.de.Comment: CVPR-2020 camera ready. Code and data are available at https://cape.is.tue.mpg.d