State of the Art and Perspectives of Biomedical Imaging at the ESRF

Over the last decade, synchrotron radiation sources have seen a significant increase in brilliance, and the advent of free electron lasers has made entire new research fields accessible to investigations with X-rays. These advances in light source capabilities have resulted not only in a host of scientific advances and discoveries, but also in a need for a new generation of X-ray imaging detectors that can match the sources' capabilities in terms of frame rate and image dynamic range while recording image information with fine granularity over a large – preferably uninterrupted – (multi)megapixel area with single-photon sensitivity. Developing such next-generation imagers is both costly and time-consuming, and the requirements at many photon science facilities are similar enough to invite a collaborative effort. The Percival (“Pixellated Energy Resolving CMOS Imager, Versatile And Large”) imager is being developed by a collaboration of DESY, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL), Elettra, and Diamond Light Source (DLS) to answer this need for the soft X-ray regime.     

核磁共振中的量子控制

近年来, 随着量子信息科学的发展, 对由量子力学原理描述的微观世界的主动调控已成为重要的前沿研究领域. 为构造实际的量子信息处理器, 一个关键的挑战是: 如何对处于噪声环境下的量子体系实现一系列高精度的任意操作, 以完成目标量子信息处理任务. 为此, 人们将经典系统控制论的思想方法延伸到量子体系的领域, 提出了大量的量子控制方法以及相关的数值技术(如量子优化控制、量子反馈控制等), 并取得了丰富的研究成果. 核磁共振自旋体系具备成熟的系统理论和操控技术, 为量子控制方法的实用性研究提供了优秀的实验测试平台. 因此, 基于核磁共振的量子控制成为量子控制领域的重要方向. 本文简要介绍了量子控制的基本概念和方法; 从系统控制论的角度对核磁共振自旋体系的基本原理和重要控制任务做了阐述; 介绍了近些年来在该领域发展的相关控制方法及其应用; 对基于核磁共振体系的量子控制的进一步的研究做了几点展望.     

超快X射线自由电子激光研究进展北大核心CSCD

现代光源的发展不断推动着人们从更深层次上理解物质的基本结构和动力学行为。X射线自由电子激光作为最先进的光源,其超高的峰值功率、超短的脉冲长度和优良的相干性,为人们以原子级时空分辨率探测和操控物质中的超快过程提供了可能。目前全世界已有多个X射线自由电子激光装置建成并投入使用,在原子分子物理、化学、生命科学、材料科学等各学科应用中都显示出了重要价值。同时大量的研究工作也集中于继续提高X射线自由电子激光的性能,包括把脉冲持续时间从fs量级进一步缩短至as量级,这将为超快科学的发展带来新突破。以超快脉冲产生为主线,综述了近年来超快X射线自由电子激光产生方案的研究进展,从产生原理、方案特性、最新成果等方面介绍了各类产生方案,总结对比了各方案的优缺点,最后对超快X射线自由电子激光的未来发展方向进行了展望。     

Nanoscale Science and Engineering in Romania

In spite of difficult working conditions and with very low financial support, many groups from Romania are involved in emerging fields, such as the nanoscale science and technology. Until the last years, this activity was developed without a central coordination and without many interactions between these research groups. In the year 2000, some of the institutes and universities active in the nanotechnology field in Romania founded the MICRONANOTECH network. The aim of this paper is to emphasize the main activities and results of the Romanian groups working in this novel domain. Most of the groups are deal with the nanomaterial technology and only few of them have activities in nanostructure science and engineering, in new concepts and device modeling and technology. This paper describes the nanotechnology research development in two of the most significant institutes from Romania: Centre for Nanotechnologies from National Institute for Research and Development in Microtehnologies (IMT-Bucharest) and from National Institute for Research and Development in Materials Physics (INCD-FM), Magurele. The Romanian research results in nanotechnology field were presented in numerous papers presented in international conferences or published in national and international journals. They are also presented in patents, international awards and fellowships. The research effort and financial support are outlined. Some future trends of the Romanian nanoscale science and technology research are also described.     

New strong-field QED effects at extreme light infrastructure

Since the work of Sauter, and Heisenberg, Euler and Köckel, it has been understood that vacuum polarization effects in quantum electrodynamics (QED) predict remarkable new phenomena such as light-light scattering and pair production from vacuum. However, these fundamental effects are difficult to probe experimentally because they are very weak, and they are difficult to analyze theoretically because they are highly nonlinear and/or nonperturbative. The extreme light infrastructure (ELI) project offers the possibility of a new window into this largely unexplored world. I review these ideas, along with some new results, explaining why quantum field theorists are so interested in this rapidly developing field of laser science. I concentrate on the theoretical tools that have been developed to analyze nonperturbative vacuum pair production.     

Vocal quality factors: analysis, synthesis, and perception.

The purpose of this study was to examine several factors of vocal quality that might be affected by changes in vocal fold vibratory patterns. Four voice types were examined: modal, vocal fry, falsetto, and breathy. Three categories of analysis techniques were developed to extract source-related features from speech and electroglottographic (EGG) signals. Four factors were found to be important for characterizing the glottal excitations for the four voice types: the glottal pulse width, the glottal pulse skewness, the abruptness of glottal closure, and the turbulent noise component. The significance of these factors for voice synthesis was studied and a new voice source model that accounted for certain physiological aspects of vocal fold motion was developed and tested using speech synthesis. Perceptual listening tests were conducted to evaluate the auditory effects of the source model parameters upon synthesized speech. The effects of the spectral slope of the source excitation, the shape of the glottal excitation pulse, and the characteristics of the turbulent noise source were considered. Applications for these research results include synthesis of natural sounding speech, synthesis and modeling of vocal disorders, and the development of speaker independent (or adaptive) speech recognition systems.     

ON THE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF MOBILITY AND IMPEDANCE METHODS IN STRUCTURAL DYNAMICS

An account of the conception and early development of mobility and impedance methods in structural dynamics is presented in this paper. As often happens in science, the concepts and ideas developed in one branch of science have inspired new approaches and theories in another branch, and indeed this was the case for mechanical mobility and impedance, which has its origin in the field of electricity. The conception and formulation of both direct and inverse electromechanical analogies are described in this paper together with the formulation of ad hoc impedance and mobility methods that were developed for mechanical systems. Finally the impedance, mobility and transmission matrix methods that evolved for flexible, distributed mechanical systems are discussed. This paper has been written with reference to a large number of published papers many of which have been listed in the reference section.     

杂质原子与金属相互作用的一种电子论

已有的根据量子力学和固体理论基本原理处理分子和固体结合特性的理论方法,受所研究对象的大小和对称性的限制,至今还不可能很好地处理许多低对称性系统问题。最近十年以来,一种建立在密度泛函理论基础上的新的理论方法则提供了这一可能。事实表明,它可以成功地说明低对称性系统的许多特性和现象。特别是加上一定的修正之后,该理论可以获得和实验资料定量上或半定量上一致的结果。本文将结合杂质原子与金属相互作用问题,介绍并讨论这一新的理论方法。     

Technological Ion Sources Based on a Vacuum Arc Discharge

Technological ion sources of the TITAN type have been developed at the Institute of High Current Electronics, RAS, for the last ten years. These sources generate wide-aperture high-current beams of gas or metal ions and also mixed two-component gas-metal ion beams with a controllable component ratio. This is possible due to two discharge systems combined into one discharge system of the source. Metal ions are obtained with a vacuum arc discharge and gas ions are generated with a constricted hollow-cathode low-pressure arc discharge. This paper describes the principle and peculiarities of operation of the given sources, their design, parameters, and fields of application. A modified version of the Mevva ion source is considered. The design of this version is based on the results of studies conducted using the TITAN source.     

Physics courses in Victoria,Australia

In the last few decades, man's knowledge and understanding of his environment has increased at a prodigious rate. The great advances in science have brought with them three important consequences which must affect the teaching of physics. Firstly, there is a greatly increased demand for trained scientists; secondly, it is now desirable, perhaps even essential, for the average man and woman to have some idea of science; and thirdly, the sheer weight of new knowledge has now made it quite impossible for any course of instruction to cover the whole of any subject.     

From space-time chaos to stochastic thermodynamics

We summarize the results of several experiments that show the evolution of some scientific interests and goals of the statistical and nonlinear physics community in the last 40 years. Specifically, we present how the ideas of extending concepts of equilibrium statistical physics to out-of-equilibrium physics have been developed to characterize various phenomena such as, for example, transition to space-time chaos and glass aging. We then discuss the applications of this out-of-equilibrium thermodynamics to microsystems driven out of equilibrium either by external forces or by temperature gradients. We show that in these systems thermal fluctuations play a role and that all thermodynamics quantities, such as work, heat, and entropy fluctuate. We recall general concepts such as fluctuation theorems and fluctuation dissipation relations used to characterize the statistical properties of these small systems. We describe experiments where all these concepts have been applied and tested with high accuracy. Finally, we show how these theoretical concepts and the experiments allowed us to improve our knowledge on the connection between information and thermodynamics.     

The use of acoustic radiation forces to position particles within fluid droplets

Handling of micrometer sizes particles, such as biological cells or coated beads, plays a relevant role in the field of life science. A number of devices have been presented in the last years, in which acoustic forces generated by coupling the vibration of a solid structure excited by a piezoelectric transducer to the particle suspension are used to collect particles in lines or position them in clumps on a grid. Following the trend of lab-on-a-chip devices, efforts have been made to shrink the size of such systems, aiming at less reagent consumption and shorter reaction times. The majority of these systems consist of closed fluid filled volumes, typically channels. Here the use of an open fluid volume, a droplet, is examined. By exciting resonances into the droplet positioned on a surface, particles can be gathered into a line, two parallel lines or, as the frequency of excitation is increased, into more complex patterns. Such a concentration process will have useful applications in improved detection sensitivity of low concentration particulate solutions.     

光无线技术及其应用

通信领域对带宽越来越大的需求正推动着传统无线通信技术的发展。虽然光通信系统和光网络能为人们提供极大的带宽,但这也意味着必须能开发出来新的设备和系统。半导体发光二极管(LED)被认为是未来在建筑、汽车和飞行器上的主要光源。相比于白光光源和荧光光源,LED能提供更高的能量效率,且由于其出色的节能性能,LED在目前全球性的二氧化碳减排行动中也扮演着重要的角色。另外,激光器目前也处在于LED类似的情形中。这些核心器件的出现很可能会大大改变我们对光的使用,不仅是在照明方面,还包括通信、传感、导航、定位、监控和成像等各个方面。     

空间光学的发展与波前传感技术

摘要：进入21世纪，国际上一些发达国家和有关部门都已制定了空间发展战略规划，如美国航空航天局（NASA）、欧洲空间局（ESA）和俄罗斯政府相关部门等都提出空间发展战略规划，这些规划提出了今后一段时间内空间科学要解决的问题和发展的方向，而解决这些问题并推进空间技术的发展很大程度上依赖于先进的光学和无线电望远镜及仪器设备。因此，本文介绍本世纪初国际上空间科学应用的大型天文望远镜的发展情况，重点描述了大口径光学望远镜的光学系统以及实现这类天文望远镜的关键技术之一一波前传感技术。     

Approaching complexity by stochastic methods: From biological systems to turbulence

This review addresses a central question in the field of complex systems: given a fluctuating (in time or space), sequentially measured set of experimental data, how should one analyze the data, assess their underlying trends, and discover the characteristics of the fluctuations that generate the experimental traces? In recent years, significant progress has been made in addressing this question for a class of stochastic processes that can be modeled by Langevin equations, including additive as well as multiplicative fluctuations or noise. Important results have emerged from the analysis of temporal data for such diverse fields as neuroscience, cardiology, finance, economy, surface science, turbulence, seismic time series and epileptic brain dynamics, to name but a few. Furthermore, it has been recognized that a similar approach can be applied to the data that depend on a length scale, such as velocity increments in fully developed turbulent flow, or height increments that characterize rough surfaces. A basic ingredient of the approach to the analysis of fluctuating data is the presence of a Markovian property, which can be detected in real systems above a certain time or length scale. This scale is referred to as the Markov-Einstein (ME) scale, and has turned out to be a useful characteristic of complex systems. We provide a review of the operational methods that have been developed for analyzing stochastic data in time and scale. We address in detail the following issues: (i) reconstruction of stochastic evolution equations from data in terms of the Langevin equations or the corresponding Fokker-Planck equations and (ii) intermittency, cascades, and multiscale correlation functions.     

Vacuum arc ion sources-a brief historical review

The production of energetic metal ion beams by vacuum arc ion sources is a subfield of ion beam science and technology that has experienced rapid growth and a great deal of research activity in the last decade or so. Interest in this kind of ion source derives from the high current of metal ions that can be produced-these are the defining and key properties of the source, and they open up areas of application that have not previously been readily accessible. We present a concise history of this field of activity. The background, history, and recent research and development are discussed     

Recent Advances in Analytical Applications of Nanomaterials in Liquid-Phase Chemiluminescence

Abstract

In recent years, many nanomaterials-assisted chemiluminescence (CL) systems have been developed to improve the sensitivity and to expand the scope of their analytical applications. In these new systems, nanomaterials participate in CL reactions as catalysts, labels, reductants, luminophors, or energy acceptors. This review mainly focuses on the recent analytical applications of metal nanoparticles, magnetic nanoparticles, quantum dots (QDs), and carbon-based nanomaterials (carbon nanotubes and graphene) in liquid-phase CL systems. Recent advances in electrochemiluminescence based on nanotechnology and its analytical applications, especially in immunoassay, DNA analysis, and other biological analyses, are also summarized. Finally, we discuss some critical challenges in this field and speculate about their solutions. A total of 177 references mainly in the last 5 years are included in this review.     

用中子散射法研究凝聚态物质的新进展

在近２０年间,由于中子源和散射装置的改进,中子散射在凝聚态物质中的应用日益广泛,许多方面是其它（ｘ射线、电子）散射技术无可比拟的。本文在简单评述供散射用的中子源和散射实验技术进展之后,重点介绍中子散射在凝聚态物质研究中的应用。它们包括晶体结构和磁结构的测定、表面、界面和薄膜的表征、测定结构涨落、磁涨落的现代相变研究、畸变、无序系统（包括分形和小角散射）和高分子材料、高Ｔ＿ｃ氧化物超导体的研究,工业上应用也作了简短讨论。