765 research outputs found
Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics
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Tuning the crystallinity parameters in macroporous titania films
Although macroporous titania scaffolds are used for many different applications, not much is known about the importance of the synthesis strategy on the resulting materials' properties. We present a comparative study on the influence of different colloidal titania precursors for direct co-deposition with poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) beads on the properties of the resulting macroporous scaffolds after calcination. The colloidal titania precursors for the film assembly differ in their size and initial crystallinity, ranging from amorphous sol-gel clusters to already crystalline pre-formed particles of 4 nm, 6 nm and 20 nm in size, as well as a combination of sol-gel and nanoparticle precursors in the so-called `Brick and Mortar' approach. The type of the precursor greatly influences the morphology, texture and the specific crystallinity parameters of the macroporous titania scaffolds after calcination such as the size of the crystalline domains, packing density of the crystallites in the macroporous walls and interconnectivity between the crystals. Moreover, the texture and the crystallinity of the films can be tuned by postsynthesis processing of the films such as calcination at different temperatures, which can be also preceded by a hydrothermal treatment. The ability to adjust the porosity, the total surface area and the crystallinity parameters of the crystalline macroporous films by selecting suitable precursors and by applying different post-synthetic treatments provides useful tools to optimize the film properties for different applications
Doppler Shift in Andreev Reflection from a Moving Superconducting Condensate in Nb/InAs Josephson Junctions
We study narrow ballistic Josephson weak links in a InAs quantum wells
contacted by Nb electrodes and find a dramatic magnetic-field suppression of
the Andreev reflection amplitude, which occurs even for in-plane field
orientation with essentially no magnetic flux through the junction. Our
observations demonstrate the presence of a Doppler shift in the energy of the
Andreev levels, which results from diamagnetic screening currents in the hybrid
Nb/InAs-banks. The data for conductance, excess and critical currents can be
consistently explained in terms of the sample geometry and the McMillan energy,
characterizing the transparency of the Nb/InAs-interface.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figures, title modifie
Sonoluminescence: Nature's Smallest BlackBody
The Spectrum of the light emitted by a sonoluminescing bubble is extremely
well fit by the spectrum of a blackbody. Furthermore the radius of emission can
be smaller than the wavelength of the light. Consequences, for theories of
sonoluminescence are discussed.Comment: 8 pages, 3 Figure
Deep Autoencoding Models for Unsupervised Anomaly Segmentation in Brain MR Images
Reliably modeling normality and differentiating abnormal appearances from
normal cases is a very appealing approach for detecting pathologies in medical
images. A plethora of such unsupervised anomaly detection approaches has been
made in the medical domain, based on statistical methods, content-based
retrieval, clustering and recently also deep learning. Previous approaches
towards deep unsupervised anomaly detection model patches of normal anatomy
with variants of Autoencoders or GANs, and detect anomalies either as outliers
in the learned feature space or from large reconstruction errors. In contrast
to these patch-based approaches, we show that deep spatial autoencoding models
can be efficiently used to capture normal anatomical variability of entire 2D
brain MR images. A variety of experiments on real MR data containing MS lesions
corroborates our hypothesis that we can detect and even delineate anomalies in
brain MR images by simply comparing input images to their reconstruction.
Results show that constraints on the latent space and adversarial training can
further improve the segmentation performance over standard deep representation
learning
Excitonic Effects on Optical Absorption Spectra of Doped Graphene
We have performed first-principles calculations to study optical absorption
spectra of doped graphene with many-electron effects included. Both self-energy
corrections and electron-hole interactions are reduced due to the enhanced
screening in doped graphene. However, self-energy corrections and excitonic
effects nearly cancel each other, making the prominent optical absorption peak
fixed around 4.5 eV under different doping conditions. On the other hand, an
unexpected increase of the optical absorbance is observed within the infrared
and visible-light frequency regime (1 ~ 3 eV). Our analysis shows that a
combining effect from the band filling and electron-hole interactions results
in such an enhanced excitonic effect on the optical absorption. These unique
variations of the optical absorption of doped graphene are of importance to
understand relevant experiments and design optoelectronic applications.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures; Nano Lett., Article ASAP (2011
Ab-initio calculation of the electronic and optical excitations in polythiophene: effects of intra- and interchain screening
We present an calculation of the electronic and optical excitations of an
isolated polythiophene chain as well as of bulk polythiophene. We use the GW
approximation for the electronic self-energy and include excitonic effects by
solving the electron-hole Bethe-Salpeter equation. The inclusion of interchain
screening in the case of bulk polythiophene drastically reduces both the
quasi-particle band gap and the exciton binding energies, but the optical gap
is hardly affected. This finding is relevant for conjugated polymers in
general.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur
Molecular geometry optimization with a genetic algorithm
We present a method for reliably determining the lowest energy structure of
an atomic cluster in an arbitrary model potential. The method is based on a
genetic algorithm, which operates on a population of candidate structures to
produce new candidates with lower energies. Our method dramatically outperforms
simulated annealing, which we demonstrate by applying the genetic algorithm to
a tight-binding model potential for carbon. With this potential, the algorithm
efficiently finds fullerene cluster structures up to starting
from random atomic coordinates.Comment: 4 pages REVTeX 3.0 plus 3 postscript figures; to appear in Physical
Review Letters. Additional information available under "genetic algorithms"
at http://www.public.iastate.edu/~deaven
Optical absorption spectra of finite systems from a conserving Bethe-Salpeter equation approach
We present a method for computing optical absorption spectra by means of a
Bethe-Salpeter equation approach, which is based on a conserving linear
response calculation for electron-hole coherences in the presence of an
external electromagnetic field. This procedure allows, in principle, for the
determination of the electron-hole correlation function self-consistently with
the corresponding single-particle Green function. We analyze the general
approach for a "one-shot" calculation of the photoabsorption cross section of
finite systems, and discuss the importance of scattering and dephasing
contributions in this approach. We apply the method to the closed-shell
clusters Na_4, Na^+_9 and Na^+_(21), treating one active electron per Na atom.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure
Excitonic effects in solids described by time-dependent density functional theory
Starting from the many-body Bethe-Salpeter equation we derive an
exchange-correlation kernel that reproduces excitonic effects in bulk
materials within time-dependent density functional theory. The resulting
accounts for both self-energy corrections and the electron-hole
interaction. It is {\em static}, {\em non-local} and has a long-range Coulomb
tail. Taking the example of bulk silicon, we show that the
divergency is crucial and can, in the case of continuum excitons, even be
sufficient for reproducing the excitonic effects and yielding excellent
agreement between the calculated and the experimental absorption spectrum.Comment: 6 pages, 1 figur
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