Measurements and Simulation Studies of Piezoceramics for Acoustic Particle Detection

Calibration sources are an indispensable tool for all detectors. In acoustic particle detection the goal of a calibration source is to mimic neutrino signatures as expected from hadronic cascades. A simple and promising method for the emulation of neutrino signals are piezo ceramics. We will present results of measruements and simulations on these piezo ceramics.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

Quasifree pion photoproduction on the deuteron in the Δ\Delta region

Photo production of pions on the deuteron is studied in the spectator nucleon model. The Born terms of the elementary production amplitude are determined in pseudovector $\pi$N coupling and supplied with a form factor. The $\Delta$ resonance is considered both in the $s$ and the $u$ channel. The parameters of the $\Delta$ resonance and the cutoff of the form factors are fixed on the leading photoproduction multipoles. Results for total and differential cross sections are compared with experimental data. Particular attention is paid to the role of Pauli correlations of the final state nucleons in the quasifree case. The results are compared with those for pion photoproduction on the nucleon.Comment: 17 pages LateX2e including 5 postscript figure

Metastability in spin polarised Fermi gases and quasiparticle decays

We investigate the metastability associated with the first order transition from normal to superfluid phases in the phase diagram of two-component polarised Fermi gases.We begin by detailing the dominant decay processes of single quasiparticles.Having determined the momentum thresholds of each process and calculated their rates, we apply this understanding to a Fermi sea of polarons by linking its metastability to the stability of individual polarons, and predicting a region of metastability for the normal partially polarised phase. In the limit of a single impurity, this region extends from the interaction strength at which a polarised phase of molecules becomes the groundstate, to the one at which the single quasiparticle groundstate changes character from polaronic to molecular. Our argument in terms of a Fermi sea of polarons naturally suggests their use as an experimental probe. We propose experiments to observe the threshold of the predicted region of metastability, the interaction strength at which the quasiparticle groundstate changes character, and the decay rate of polarons

Double-impulse magnetic focusing of launched cold atoms.

We have theoretically investigated three-dimensional focusing of a launched cloud of cold atoms using a pair of magnetic lens pulses (the alternate-gradient method). Individual lenses focus radially and defocus axially or vice versa. The performance of the two possible pulse sequences are compared and found to be ideal for loading both 'pancake' and 'sausage' shaped magnetic/optical microtraps. It is shown that focusing aberrations are considerably smaller for double-impulse magnetic lenses compared to single-impulse magnetic lenses. An analysis of clouds focused by the double-impulse technique is presented

Radiative pion capture by a nucleon

The differential cross sections for $\pi^- p \to \gamma n$ and $\pi^+ n \to \gamma p$ are computed up to $O(p^3)$ in heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory (HBChPT). The expressions at $O(p)$ and $O(p^2)$ have no free parameters. There are three unknown parameters at $O(p^3)$, low energy constants of the HBChPT Lagrangian, which are determined by fitting to experimental data. Two acceptable fits are obtained, which can be separated by comparing with earlier dispersion relation calculations of the inverse process. Expressions for the multipoles, with emphasis on the p-wave multipoles, are obtained and evaluated at threshold. Generally the results obtained from the best of the two fits are in good agreement with the dispersion relation predictions.Comment: 24 pages, Latex, using RevTe

Synthetic Elastography using B-mode Ultrasound through a Deep Fully-Convolutional Neural Network

Shear-wave elastography (SWE) permits local estimation of tissue elasticity, an important imaging marker in biomedicine. This recently-developed, advanced technique assesses the speed of a laterally-travelling shear wave after an acoustic radiation force "push" to estimate local Young's moduli in an operator-independent fashion. In this work, we show how synthetic SWE (sSWE) images can be generated based on conventional B-mode imaging through deep learning. Using side-by-side-view B-mode/SWE images collected in 50 patients with prostate cancer, we show that sSWE images with a pixel-wise mean absolute error of 4.5+/-0.96 kPa with regard to the original SWE can be generated. Visualization of high-level feature levels through t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding reveals substantial overlap between data from two different scanners. Qualitatively, we examined the use of the sSWE methodology for B-mode images obtained with a scanner without SWE functionality. We also examined the use of this type of network in elasticity imaging in the thyroid. Limitations of the technique reside in the fact that networks have to be retrained for different organs, and that the method requires standardization of the imaging settings and procedure. Future research will be aimed at development of sSWE as an elasticity-related tissue typing strategy that is solely based on B-mode ultrasound acquisition, and the examination of its clinical utility.Comment: (c) 2020 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other work

MR Imaging of Prostate Cancer: Diffusion Weighted Imaging and (3D) Hydrogen 1 (1H) MR Spectroscopy in Comparison with Histology

Purpose. To evaluate retrospectively the impact of diffusion weighted imaging (DWI) and (3D) hydrogen 1 (1H) MR-spectroscopy (MRS) on the detection of prostatic cancer in comparison to histological examinations. Materials and Methods: 50 patients with suspicion of prostate cancer underwent a MRI examination at a 1.5T scanner. The prostate was divided into sextants. Regions of interest were placed in each sextant to evaluate the apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC)-values. The results of the DWI as well as MRS were compared retrospectively with the findings of the histological examination. Sensitivity and specificity of ADC and metabolic ratio (MET)—both separately and in combination—for identification of tumor tissue was computed for variable discrimination thresholds to evaluate its receiver operator characteristic (ROC). An association between ADC, MET and Gleason score was tested by the non-parametric Spearman ρ-test. Results. The average ADC-value was 1.65 ± 0.32mm2/s × 10−3 in normal tissue and 0.96±0.24 mm2/s × 10−3 in tumor tissue (mean ± 1 SD). MET was 0.418 ± 0.431 in normal tissue and 2.010 ± 1.649 in tumor tissue. The area under the ROC curve was 0.966 (95%-confidence interval 0.941–0.991) and 0.943 (0.918–0.968) for DWI and MRS, respectively. There was a highly significant negative correlation between ADC-value and the Gleason score in the tumor-positive tissue probes (n = 62, ρ = −0.405, P = .001). MRS did not show a significant correlation with the Gleason score (ρ = 0.117, P = .366). By using both the DWI and MRS, the regression model provided sensitivity and specificity for detection of tumor of 91.9% and 98.3%, respectively. Conclusion. The results of our study showed that both DWI and MRS should be considered as an additional and complementary tool to the T2-weighted MRI for detecting prostate cancer

On the ultimate convergence rates for isotropic algorithms and the best choices among various forms of isotropy

In this paper, we show universal lower bounds for isotropic algorithms, that hold for any algorithm such that each new point is the sum of one already visited p oint plus one random isotropic direction multiplied by any step size (whenever the step size is chosen by an oracle with arbitrarily high computational power). The bound is 1 − O(1/d) for the constant in the linear convergence (i.e. the constant C such that the distance to the optimum after n steps is upp er b ounded by C n ), as already seen for some families of evolution strategies in [19, 12], in contrast with 1 − O(1) for the reverse case of a random step size and a direction chosen by an oracle with arbitrary high computational power. We then recall that isotropy does not uniquely determine the distribution of a sample on the sphere and show that the convergence rate in isotropic algorithms is improved by using stratified or antithetic isotropy instead of naive isotropy. We show at the end of the pap er that b eyond the mathematical proof, the result holds on exp eriments. We conclude that one should use antithetic-isotropy or stratified-isotropy, and never standard-isotropy