The Power of Encouragement: The Role of Christian Academic Librarians in Supporting the Whole Student

Christian librarians are exhorted to consider the role of providing encouragement, care, and emotional and spiritual support to college students. Caring for the whole student can have a positive impact on college student success and retention, as well as have a transformational effect on students’ spiritual lives. By treating college students as whole persons created in the image of God, Christians academic librarians can not only help these students succeed by meeting their academic needs, but also help students thrive by supporting them emotionally and spiritually

Cryogenic loss monitors with FPGA TDC signal processing

Radiation hard helium gas ionization chambers capable of operating in vacuum at temperatures ranging from 5K to 350K have been designed, fabricated and tested and will be used inside the cryostats at Fermilab's Superconducting Radiofrequency beam test facility. The chamber vessels are made of stainless steel and all materials used including seals are known to be radiation hard and suitable for operation at 5K. The chambers are designed to measure radiation up to 30 kRad/hr with sensitivity of approximately 1.9 pA/(Rad/hr). The signal current is measured with a recycling integrator current-to-frequency converter to achieve a required measurement capability for low current and a wide dynamic range. A novel scheme of using an FPGA-based time-to-digital converter (TDC) to measure time intervals between pulses output from the recycling integrator is employed to ensure a fast beam loss response along with a current measurement resolution better than 10-bit. This paper will describe the results obtained and highlight the processing techniques used.Comment: 7 pp. 2nd International Conference on Technology and Instrumentation in Particle Physics 2011: TIPP 2011. 9-14 Jun 2011. Chicago, Illinoi

Quark Potentials in the Higgs Phase of Large N Supersymmetric Yang-Mills Theories

We compute, in the large N limit, the quark potential for ${\cal N}=4$ supersymmetric SU(N) Yang-Mills theory broken to $SU(N_1) \times SU(N_2)$. At short distances the quarks see only the unbroken gauge symmetry and have an attractive potential that falls off as 1/L. At longer distances the interquark interaction is sensitive to the symmetry breaking, and other QCD states appear. These states correspond to combinations of the quark-antiquark pair with some number of W-particles. If there is one or more W-particles then this state is unstable because of the coulomb interaction between the W-particles and between the W's and the quarks. As L is decreased the W-particles delocalize and these coulomb branches merge onto a branch with a linear potential. The quarks on this branch see the unbroken gauge group, but the flux tube is unstable to the production of W-particles.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, harvmac (b

Using context to make gas classifiers robust to sensor drift

The interaction of a gas particle with a metal-oxide based gas sensor changes the sensor irreversibly. The compounded changes, referred to as sensor drift, are unstable, but adaptive algorithms can sustain the accuracy of odor sensor systems. This paper shows how such a system can be defined without additional data acquisition by transfering knowledge from one time window to a subsequent one after drift has occurred. A context-based neural network model is used to form a latent representation of sensor state, thus making it possible to generalize across a sequence of states. When tested on samples from unseen subsequent time windows, the approach performed better than drift-naive and ensemble methods on a gas sensor array drift dataset. By reducing the effect that sensor drift has on classification accuracy, context-based models may be used to extend the effective lifetime of gas identification systems in practical settings

Supersoft elasticity in polydomain nematic elastomers

We consider the equilibrium stress-strain behavior of polydomain liquid crystal elastomers (PLCEs). We show that there is a fundamental difference between PLCEs cross-linked in the high temperature isotropic and low temperature aligned states. PLCEs cross-linked in the isotropic state then cooled to an aligned state will exhibit extremely soft elasticity (confirmed by recent experiments) and ordered director patterns characteristic of textured deformations. PLCEs cross-linked in the aligned state will be mechanically much harder and characterized by disclination textures

Elasticity of Polydomain Liquid Crystal Elastomers

We model polydomain liquid-crystal elastomers by extending the neo-classical soft and semi-soft free energies used successfully to describe monodomain samples. We show that there is a significant difference between polydomains cross-linked in homogeneous high symmetry states then cooled to low symmetry polydomain states and those cross-linked directly in the low symmetry polydomain state. For example, elastomers cross-linked in the isotropic state then cooled to a nematic polydomain will, in the ideal limit, be perfectly soft, and with the introduction of non-ideality, will deform at very low stress until they are macroscopically aligned. The director patterns observed in them will be disordered, characteristic of combinations of random deformations, and not disclination patterns. We expect these samples to exhibit elasticity significantly softer than monodomain samples. Polydomains cross-linked in the nematic polydomain state will be mechanically harder and contain characteristic schlieren director patterns. The models we use for polydomain elastomers are spatially heterogeneous, so rather than solving them exactly we elucidate this behavior by bounding the energies using Taylor-like (compatible test strain fields) and Sachs (constant stress) limits extended to non-linear elasticity. Good agreement is found with experiments that reveal the supersoft response of some polydomains. We also analyze smectic polydomain elastomers and propose that polydomain SmC* elastomers cross-linked in the SmA monodomain state are promising candidates for low field electrical actuation.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure