5,598 research outputs found
The Practical Challenges of Interference Alignment
Interference alignment (IA) is a revolutionary wireless transmission strategy
that reduces the impact of interference. The idea of interference alignment is
to coordinate multiple transmitters so that their mutual interference aligns at
the receivers, facilitating simple interference cancellation techniques. Since
IA's inception, researchers have investigated its performance and proposed
improvements, verifying IA's ability to achieve the maximum degrees of freedom
(an approximation of sum capacity) in a variety of settings, developing
algorithms for determining alignment solutions, and generalizing transmission
strategies that relax the need for perfect alignment but yield better
performance. This article provides an overview of the concept of interference
alignment as well as an assessment of practical issues including performance in
realistic propagation environments, the role of channel state information at
the transmitter, and the practicality of interference alignment in large
networks.Comment: submitted to IEEE Wireless Communications Magazin
Variation in annual volume at a university hospital does not predict mortality for pancreatic resections.
Annual volume of pancreatic resections has been shown to affect mortality rates, prompting recommendations to regionalize these procedures to high-volume hospitals. Implementation has been difficult, given the paucity of high-volume centers and the logistical hardships facing patients. Some studies have shown that low-volume hospitals achieve good outcomes as well, suggesting that other factors are involved. We sought to determine whether variations in annual volume affected patient outcomes in 511 patients who underwent pancreatic resections at the University of California, San Francisco between 1990 and 2005. We compared postoperative mortality and complication rates between low, medium, or high volume years, designated by the number of resections performed, adjusting for patient characteristics. Postoperative mortality rates did not differ between high volume years and medium/low volume years. As annual hospital volume of pancreatic resections may not predict outcome, identification of actual predictive factors may allow low-volume centers to achieve excellent outcomes
Electronic Properties of Strained Si/Ge Core-Shell Nanowires
We investigated the electronic properties of strained Si/Ge core-shell
nanowires along the [110] direction using first principles calculations based
on density-functional theory. The diameter of the studied core-shell wire is up
to 5 nm. We found the band gap of the core-shell wire is smaller than that of
both pure Si and Ge wires with the same diameter. This reduced band gap is
ascribed to the intrinsic strain between Ge and Si layers, which partially
counters the quantum confinement effect. The external strain is further applied
to the nanowires for tuning the band structure and band gap. By applying
sufficient tensile strain, we found the band gap of Si-core/Ge-shell nanowire
with diameter larger than ~3 nm experiences a transition from direct to
indirect gap.Comment: 4 figure
Topology of Fermi Surfaces and anomaly inflows
We derive a rigorous classification of topologically stable Fermi surfaces of
non-interacting, discrete translation-invariant systems from electronic band
theory, adiabatic evolution and their topological interpretations. For systems
on an infinite crystal it is shown that there can only be topologically
unstable Fermi surfaces. For systems on a half- space and with a gapped bulk,
our derivation naturally yields a -theory classification. Given the
-dimensional surface Brillouin zone of a -dimensional
half-space, our result implies that different classes of globally stable Fermi
surfaces belong in for systems with only
discrete translation-invariance. This result has a chiral anomaly inflow
interpretation, as it reduces to the spectral flow for . Through
equivariant homotopy methods we extend these results for symmetry classes
and and discuss their corresponding anomaly inflow
interpretation.Comment: Removed Born-von Karman boundary conditions for and
and includes the 'weak' topological phase
found by Kitaev for $\Xi^2 = I, d= 2
Experimental generation of an optical field with arbitrary spatial coherence properties
We describe an experimental technique to generate a quasi-monochromatic field
with any arbitrary spatial coherence properties that can be described by the
cross-spectral density function, . This is done by using a
dynamic binary amplitude grating generated by a digital micromirror device
(DMD) to rapidly alternate between a set of coherent fields, creating an
incoherent mix of modes that represent the coherent mode decomposition of the
desired . This method was then demonstrated experimentally
by interfering two plane waves and then spatially varying the coherent between
these two modes such that the interference fringe visibility was shown to vary
spatially between the two beams in an arbitrary and prescribed way.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figur
Amplification of Angular Rotations Using Weak Measurements
We present a weak measurement protocol that permits a sensitive estimation of
angular rotations based on the concept of weak-value amplification. The shift
in the state of a pointer, in both angular position and the conjugate orbital
angular momentum bases, is used to estimate angular rotations. This is done by
an amplification of both the real and imaginary parts of the weak-value of a
polarization operator that has been coupled to the pointer, which is a spatial
mode, via a spin-orbit coupling. Our experiment demonstrates the first
realization of weak-value amplification in the azimuthal degree of freedom. We
have achieved effective amplification factors as large as 100, providing a
sensitivity that is on par with more complicated methods that employ quantum
states of light or extremely large values of orbital angular momentum.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, contains supplementary informatio
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