A simple molecular theory for photo-induced smectic phase

The response of liquid crystals to light is very important for applications of liquid crystals in display and memory devices. Recently experiments have been carried out on liquid crystals doped with photoactive azo compounds. It is seen that UV rays incident on such systems can lower the nematic isotropic transition temperature T _NI . Also, in some mixtures, a photo-induced smectic phase is observed. This is attributed to the change in the trans (longer) isomer to cis (shorter) isomer of the photoactive dopant. We have earlier developed a molecular mean-field model assuming the medium to consist of inter-converting anti-parallel and parallel pairs to explain the molecular origin of “two lengths”. The model was used to explain double re-entrance, the effect of electric field on T _NI , etc. This model is modified to include the change of trans to cis isomer which is equivalent to an increase of fraction of parallel (shorter) pairs. The calculated phase diagram with respect to incident UV radiation energy shows an induced smectic phase. This is in qualitative agreement with experimental trends.     

A simple precision phase calibrator

A circuit is described which produces two square wave outputs with precise phase differences between them. The range of phase differences which may be selected is from 0° to 360° in increments of 22·5°. However, any increment given by 180°/n, where n is an integer, can be achieved by a suitable choise of circuit components. The device is intended as a means of checking the calibration of phase meters or even for actually calibrating such meters.     

A design for a nonreciprocal phase shifter

A design is described for a nonreciprocal phase shifter, which is the key element in the constitution of a Mach-Zehnder interferometric isolator consisting of a magneto-optical channel waveguide. A four-layered structure waveguide is dealt with in which a cover layer having a larger refractive index than that of the film is placed on the magneto-optic thin film; it is revealed that the phase shifter length can be shortened by up to 6 mm at the 1.15 m wavelength, which is half the length of a nonreciprocal phase shifter constructed of a three-layered waveguide without a large refractive index cover layer. Two types of channel waveguides are investigated: a rib waveguide and a strip-loaded waveguide; they are found to have the same phase shifter length for the optimum condition.     

Coherence levels and coherence pathways in NMR. A simple way to design phase cycling procedures

The paper presents a simple way of calculating what a phase cycling procedure in a pulse NMR experiment does. This is done by exploiting the fact that if a pulse is phase shifted by angle φ and if it changes the coherence level by Δm, then the effect on the coherence is a multiplication by e^iΔmφ The coherence level is a fundamental quantum number of the system-the z component of the Liouville space angular momentum—and is a generalization of the number of quanta in a multiple-quantum transition. The sequence of coherence levels that a signal passes through between the first pulse and the time it reaches the receiver is the coherence pathway. This pathway, combined with the above formula, provides a powerful method for analyzing pulse NMR experiments.     

A simple scheme for the design of solvent-suppression pulses

Excitation sculpting was first introduced as a way to efficiently suppress solvent signals. It requires a pulse sequence that acts as a null pulse at the solvent-resonance frequency and as an inversion pulse everywhere else. In this article, it is shown that such a goal can be achieved starting with "top-hat" inversion shaped pulses such as I-BURP-2 or gaussian cascade G3. The result is a Globally Antisymmetric Selective Pulse, or GASP. Numerical optimization was used to extend the performance of such pulses. Multifrequency signal suppression was shown to be possible through application of successive excitation sculpting modules.     

A geometry optimization framework for photonic crystal design

The performance of photonic crystal devices can depend strongly on their geometry. Alas, their fundamental physics offers relatively little by way of pointers in terms of optimum shapes, so numerical design search techniques must be used in an attempt to determine high performance layouts. We discuss strategies for solving this type of optimization problem, the main challenge of which is the conflict between the enormous size of the space of potentially useful designs and the relatively high computational cost of evaluating the performance of putative shapes. The optimization technique proposed here operates over increasing levels of fidelity, both in terms of the resolution of its non-parametric shape definition and in terms of the resolution of the numerical analysis of the performance of putative designs. This is a generic method, potentially applicable to any type of electromagnetic device shape design problem. We also consider a methodology for assessing the robustness of the optima generated through this process, investigating the impact of manufacturing errors on their performance. As an illustration, we apply this technology to the design of a two-dimensional photonic crystal structure; the result features a large complete band gap structure and a topology that is different from previously published designs.     

A simple thermal phase stabilizer for real-time optical fibre holographic interferometry

An optical fibre interferometer can be made to phase-stabilize by simply attaching a short length of one arm of the interferometer to a straight copper track and heating the track with an electric current. This feedback thermal stabilization scheme works well even for relatively short fibre lengths and there is no need to treat or unjacket the fibre. A fibre-optic Michelson interferometer stabilized by this method successfully provided object and reference beams for real-time holographic interferometric measurements of the distortion of heated test objects.     

A simple method for phase wraps elimination or reduction in spatial fringe patterns

In this paper, we propose a simple method for processing a 2D wrapped phase map that contains a spatial carrier signal in order to completely eliminate, or greatly reduce, the number of phase wraps in the image. The 2D Fourier transform of the wrapped phase map is calculated. Then the spectrum is shifted to the origin in frequency space. After that, the inverse 2D Fourier transform is computed. Finally, a four-quadrant arctangent function is used to calculate the angle of the complex array that was produced by the inverse 2D Fourier transform. This produces a phase map with a smaller number of 2π phase jumps than the original phase map. In some cases, all of the phase wraps are eliminated and there is therefore no need to unwrap the resultant phase map. The reduction of the number of 2π phase jumps can reduce the execution time and improve the noise performance of some phase unwrapping algorithms such as the Flynn method. The validation of the proposed algorithm is demonstrated experimentally and also via computer-simulation.     

动态电路冲激响应初始值的一种简易求法

给出了求解动态电路冲激响应初始值和动态奇异电路响应初始值的一种简易方法.在电路换路后,其电容电压或电感电流的初始状态一般不产生跃变,但有时也可能产生跃变,当一时难于确定时,可先将电路化为其s域模型,并将0-值带进换路后的电路模型,再应用拉氏变换的初值定理,即可在s域解决t域响应的初始状态0 值的问题.该方法广泛适用于各种电路.     

A dual phase genetic algorithm for improved initial access in 5G millimeter wave communication

Initial access (IA) in 5G millimeter wave (mmWave) communication is the problem of establishing a directional link between the base station (BS) and the user equipment (UE). For a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) system, where both the BS and UE have many antennas, finding the optimal beams can be prohibitively expensive in terms of delay and computation. In this work, we propose a meta-heuristic approach which is a modified dual-phase genetic algorithm. Since it is a meta-heuristic approach, it is generic and hence does not require extensive modifications to apply to different scenarios, it also does not require context information such as prior knowledge of channel state or statistics of user behavior. The proposed method is using iterative search for the optimal beams, but switch to a different fine-grained search phase on later iterations in order to quickly converge to the local optimum. The effect of this approach is analyzed in terms of capacity achieved vs number of transmit and receive antennas at BS and UE, codebook size, outage probability, total transmitted power, and other parameters specific to this particular dual-phase method. The proposed work has shown improved performance when compared to the existing similar work done in Souto et al. (2019) in terms of capacity achieved (2.12%), reduced power consumption (8.57%), and reduced IA delay (35% to 50%).     

Structural optimization design for large mirror

The system design must be started from the concept with low cost and high performance. In this point, the topological shape of the structure is very important in the view of the structural rigidities and light-weight design.In this paper, the optimization methodology is presented in the design stage of the large optical mirror. We obtain the optimal layout through the topology optimization and then design the details through the size or shape optimization for structural rigidity.     

Simplex optimization method for illumination design

A modified simplex optimization method is developed for the design of illumination systems. The simplex method is a judicious choice for illumination optimization because of its robustness and convergence properties. To optimize the simplex method, its four parameters are adjusted dependent on the dimensionality of the space to converge with fewer iterations. This work is presented for the end game, when the optimizer is converging on a local optimum rather than searching for it. Up to a 37% reduction in the number of computations is realized. An example using a compound parabolic concentrator is compared between the standard and the modified simplex methods, providing over 22% improvement in the end game.     

A simple statistical modeling of random phase reference in holographic memory

We present a simple modeling of random phase reference in holographic memory. The proposed model is analyzed by a statistical approach. Improvement on selectivity using random phase reference is shown in comparison with uniform phase plane wave reference and Gaussian beam reference. This simple and efficient model provides a physical insight and is verified by some experiments.     

Constraining the initial phase in water-fat separation

An algorithm is described for use in chemical shift-based water-fat separation to constrain the phase of both species to be equal at an echo time of zero. This constraint is physically reasonable since the initial phase should be a property of the excitation pulse and receiver coil only. The advantages of phase constrained water-fat separation, namely, improved noise performance and/or reduced data requirements (fewer echos), are demonstrated in simulations and experiments.     

A comparison between different optimization criteria for tuned mass dampers design

Tuned mass sampers (TMDs) are widely used strategies for vibration control in many engineering applications, so that many TMD optimization criteria have been proposed till now. However, they normally consider only TMD stiffness and damping as design variables and assume that the tuned mass is a pre-selected value. In this work a more complete approach is proposed and then also TMD mass ratio is optimized. A standard single degree of freedom system is investigated to evaluate TMD protection efficiency in case of excitation at the support. More precisely, this model is used to develop two different optimizations criteria which minimize the main system displacement or the inertial acceleration. Different environmental conditions described by various characterizations of the input, here modelled by a stationary filtered stochastic process, are considered. Results show that all solutions obtained considering also the mass of the TMD as design variable are more efficient if compared with those obtained without it. However, in many cases these solutions are inappropriate because the optimal TMD mass is greater than real admissible values in practical technical applications for civil and mechanical engineering. Anyway, one can deduce that there are some interesting indications for applications in some actual contexts. In fact, the results show that there are some ranges of environmental parameters ranges where results attained by the displacement criterion are compatible with real applications requiring some percent of main system mass. Finally, the present research gives promising indications for complete TMD optimization application in emerging technical contexts, as micromechanical devices and nano resonant beams.     

A simple design method of negative refractive index metamaterials

We propose a very simple design method of negative refractive index (NRI) materials that can overcome some drawbacks of conventional resonant-type NRI materials. The proposed NRI materials consist of single or double metallic patterns printed on a dielectric substrate. Our metamaterials (MTMs) show two properties that are different from other types of MTMs in obtaining effective negative values of permittivity (ε) and permeability (μ) simultaneously; the geometrical outlines of the metallic patterns are not confined within any specific shape, and the metallic patterns are printed on only one side of the dielectric substrate. Therefore, they are very easy to design and fabricate using common printed circuit board (PCB) technology according to the appropriate application. Excellent agreement between the experiment and prediction data ensures the validity of our design approach.     

OTF-based optimization criteria for automatic optical design

Optimization techniques for lens design require that some criterion, or figure of merit, is chosen to describe the performance of the optical system. This study is concerned with systems where the true criterion is the diffraction optical transfer function (OTF). Recent investigations [1] have shown that the geometrical approximation to the diffraction OTF is a valid criterion for OTF optimization for all practical ranges of aberration size and spatial frequency. This paper gives details of these investigations, and compares the geometric criterion with other optimization criteria. It will be shown that in most cases the geometric criterion is markedly superior.     

基于梯度响应面模型的优化设计

本文主要研究一种梯度响应面模型及其在气动优化设计中的应用. 目前应用广泛的多项式响应面模型是连续可导的, 采用梯度信息构造完全二阶多项式响应面模型, 所需样本数与设计参数个数呈线性关系. 首先通过改进实验设计方法, 快速生成满足精度要求的样本并确定梯度响应面模型. 随后通过函数实验验证梯度响应面模型的精度, 及该模型在多极值函数最值搜索中的有效性. 最后由伴随方法快速求解气动优化设计目标函数的梯度信息, 并开展基于梯度响应面模型和复合形法的叶片压力反设计和效率优化设计. 结果表明: 基于梯度响应面模型的优化方法在全局最优及提高优化效率两方面均有出色表现, 基于该优化方法的气动优化设计能够显著改善叶片的气动性能. 关键词： 气动优化设计 响应面模型 伴随方法 复合形法