The μSR facilities at PSI

TheSR Facility Instruments presently available at PSI and the envisaged medium- and long-term developments are presented. The plans focus on further upgrades of the existing instruments and the development of new techniques using the very high fluxes becoming available at PSI, in particular the setup of a beamline with a fast kicker for muons on request (MORE) and the development of very low energy muon beams.     

A Hybrid Approach to Scheduling with Earliness and Tardiness Costs

A hybrid technique using constraint programming and linear programming is applied to the problem of scheduling with earliness and tardiness costs. The linear model maintains a set of relaxed optimal start times which are used to guide the constraint programming search heuristic. In addition, the constraint programming problem model employs the strong constraint propagation techniques responsible for many of the advances in constraint programming for scheduling in the past few years. Empirical results validate our approach and show, in particular, that creating and solving a subproblem containing only the activities with direct impact on the cost function and then using this solution in the main search, significantly increases the number of problems that can be solved to optimality while significantly decreasing the search time.     

Homological methods in algebraic map theory

The primary intent of the present paper is to adapt familiar notions of algebraic topology, such as the fundamental group, homology, and cohomology to the context of algebraic maps and their (ramified) covering projections. The notion of a principal derived map is already fairly well understood in terms of the defining voltages; however, once it is recognized that voltages are essentially cohomological in nature, the functorial interplay among homology provides a very tractible methodology for studying such properties as connectivity or regularity of the covering, or for obtaining explicit constructions of the voltages affording the given covering map.     

Existence and convergence for quasi‐static evolution in brittle fracture

This paper investigates the mathematical well‐posedness of the variational model of quasi‐static growth for a brittle crack proposed by Francfort and Marigo in [15]. The starting point is a time discretized version of that evolution which results in a sequence of minimization problems of Mumford and Shah type functionals. The natural weak setting is that of special functions of bounded variation, and the main difficulty in showing existence of the time‐continuous quasi‐static growth is to pass to the limit as the time‐discretization step tends to 0. This is performed with the help of a jump transfer theorem which permits, under weak convergence assumptions for a sequence {u_n} of SBV‐functions to its BV‐limit u, to transfer the part of the jump set of any test field that lies in the jump set of u onto that of the converging sequence {u_n}. In particular, it is shown that the notion of minimizer of a Mumford and Shah type functional for its own jump set is stable under weak convergence assumptions. Furthermore, our analysis justifies numerical methods used for computing the time‐continuous quasi‐static evolution. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Divergent Cesàro and Riesz means of Jacobi and Laguerre expansions

We show that for below certain critical indices there are functions whose Jacobi or Laguerre expansions have almost everywhere divergent Cesàro and Riesz means of order .

     

Poincaré duality in P.A. Smith theory

Let , or more generally be a finite -group, where is an odd prime. If acts on a space whose cohomology ring fulfills Poincaré duality (with appropriate coefficients ), we prove a mod congruence between the total Betti number of and a number which depends only on the -module structure of . This improves the well known mod congruences that hold for actions on general spaces.

     

Coherent reflection in a two-dimensional cochlea: Short-wave versus long-wave scattering in the generation of reflection-source otoacoustic emissions

The theory of coherent reflection filtering explains the empirical form of the cochlear reflectance by showing how it emerges from the coherent "backscattering" of forward-traveling waves by impedance perturbations in the mechanics of the cochlear partition. Since the theory was developed using the one-dimensional (1-D) transmission-line model of the cochlea, an obvious logical shortcoming is the failure of the long-wavelength approximation near the peak of the traveling wave, where coherent backscattering is purported to occur. Indeed, existing theory suggests that wave reflection may be strongly suppressed in the short-wave regime. To understand how short-wave behavior near the peak modifies the predictions of the long-wave theory, this paper solves the scattering problem in the 2-D cochlear model. The 2-D problem is reduced to a 1-D wave equation and the solution expressed as an infinite series in which successive terms arise via multiple scattering within the cochlea. The cochlear reflectance is computed in response-matched models constructed by solving the inverse problem to control for variations in mechanical tuning among models of different heights and dimensionality. Reflection from the peak region is significantly enhanced by the short-wave hydrodynamics, but other conclusions of the 1-D analysis--such as the predicted relation between emission group delay and the wavelength of the traveling wave--carry over with only minor modifications. The results illustrate the important role of passive hydromechanical effects in shaping otoacoustic emissions and cochlear tuning.     

Porous solgel fiber as a transducer for highly sensitive chemical sensing

A novel solgel process for making porous silica fiber and doping the fiber core with sensing material is described. A CoCl(2) -doped solgel fiber was fabricated and was used to construct an active-core optical fiber moisture sensor. Test results show that the sensitivity of the active-core optical fiber sensor is much higher than that of an evanescent-wave-based optical fiber sensor.     

Hybrid chirped-pulse amplification

Conversion efficiency in optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification is limited by spatiotemporal characteristics of the pump pulse. We have demonstrated a novel hybrid chirped-pulse amplification scheme that uses a single pump pulse and combines optical parametric amplification and laser amplification to achieve high gain, high conversion efficiency, and high prepulse contrast without utilization of electro-optic modulators. We achieved an overall conversion efficiency of 37% from the hybrid amplification system at a center wavelength of 820nm. Generation of multiterawatt pulses is possible by use of this simple method and commercial Q -switched pump lasers.     

Muonium adduct radicals from vinyl-aromatic compounds

During irradiation of liquid samples of 1-vinylimidazole, 2-vinylnaphthalene, 2-vinylpyridine, 4-vinylpyridine and 1,1-diphenylethene with positive muons, radicals of the type MuCH₂ĊHAr (Ar=the appropriate aromatic group), and the MuCH₂ĊPh₂ radical were observed by transverse field μSR; the muon hyperfine couplings are considered in the context of the effectiveness of the aryl groups in delocalising the unpaired electron.