Quantifying Viscoelastic Properties of Nylon-6,6 Actuators

Orthostatic Hypotension (OH) is a prevalent condition affecting 52.1% of stroke patients, characterized by a drop in atrial blood pressure upon standing. This is due to the pooling of blood in the abdomen and leg, and OH results in debilitating symptoms of nausea, lightheadedness, and dizziness. Current management techniques are limited and not very effective, so I propose an active, compression abdominal band that contracts when needed. This device should have a minimal design, so nylon-6,6 actuators, powerful artificial muscles created from fishing line and conductive thread, were chosen as the compressive element. Given that previous research focused on strength and force-excursion characteristics of these actuators, this study focuses on determining their viability for this application by conducting stress-relaxation and creep tests on single actuators (sample sizes of 10) and on a forty actuator band. Stress-relaxation results indicate that actuators will be able to maintain tension levels required effective compression 18 times as long as necessary. Creep testing is inconclusive due to oscillations found in the data as a result of low processing power of the Instron machine used to conduct tests. Despite the fact that more tests need to be conducted to resolve various limitations of this study,I conclude that I can move forward to create a prototype of the abdominal band.Biomedical Engineerin

Analogue algorithm for parallel factorization of an exponential number of large integers I. Theoretical description

We describe a novel analogue algorithm that allows the simultaneous factorization of an exponential number of large integers with a polynomial number of experimental runs. It is the interference-induced periodicity of "factoring" interferograms measured at the output of an analogue computer that allows the selection of the factors of each integer [1,2,3,4]. At the present stage the algorithm manifests an exponential scaling which may be overcome by an extension of this method to correlated qubits emerging from n-order quantum correlations measurements. We describe the conditions for a generic physical system to compute such an analogue algorithm. A particular example given by an "optical computer" based on optical interference will be addressed in the second paper of this series [5].Comment: to be published in Quantum Information Processing (QIP

Symmetries and entanglement features of inner-mode resolved correlations of interfering nonidentical photons

Multiphoton quantum interference underpins fundamental tests of quantum mechanics and quantum technologies. Consequently, the detrimental effect of photon distinguishability in multiphoton interference experiments can be catastrophic. Here, we employ correlation measurements in the photonic inner modes, time or frequency, to restore quantum interference between photons differing in their colors or injection times in arbitrary linear optical networks, without the need for additional filtering or post selection. Interestingly, we demonstrate how harnessing the multiphoton inner-mode quantum information enables to unravel symmetries of multiphoton networks and states and the generation of an entire class of multipartite entangled states with a fixed interferometer. These results are therefore of profound interest for future applications of universal inner-mode resolved linear optics across fundamental science and quantum technologies with photons with experimentally different spectral properties.Comment: Comments are welcom

Boson sampling with non-identical single photons

The boson sampling problem has triggered a lot of interest in the scientific community because of its potential of demonstrating the computational power of quantum interference without the need of non-linear processes. However, the intractability of such a problem with any classical device relies on the realization of single photons approximately identical in their spectra. In this paper we discuss the physics of boson sampling with non-identical single photon sources, which is strongly relevant in view of scalable experimental realizations and triggers fascinating questions in complexity theory