Controlling the propagation of broadband light pulses by Electromagnetically Induced Transparency

We present an experimental and theoretical investigation, performed on hot sodium atoms in a ladder scheme, showing the control of the absorption and of the propagation velocity of a probe light pulse with a spectral bandwidth as large as 1.8 GHz. The predictions of the theoretical model compare favorably with the experimental results.     

Time-dependent density functional theory molecular dynamics simulation of doubly charged uracil in gas phase

We use time-dependent density functional theory and Born-Oppenheimer molecular dynamics methods to investigate the fragmentation of doubly ionized uracil in gas phase. Different initial electronic excited states of the dication are obtained by removing electrons from different inner-shell orbitals of the neutral species. We show that shape-equivalent orbitals lead to very different fragmentation patterns revealing the importance of the intramolecular chemical environment. The results are in good agreement with ionion coincidence measurements of uracil collision with 100 keV protons.     

Rapid Method to Screen Unopened Bottles to Detect Concealed Drugs

A bottle screening method to detect smuggling drugs was developed based on a series of rapid and automated magnetic resonance measurements. Liquid alteration is detected by evaluating chemical and physical properties of the liquid, scanning the bottle with a compact, non-contact magnetic resonance probe. Chemical and molecular diffusion changes are detected by means of the magnetic resonance relaxation time. The inspection device automatically detects the presence of concealed powders dissolved in liquids in a second timescale. The non-ionizing, non-contact method effectively screens bottles, regardless of their shape, size, and color. The proposed system configuration does not require a large magnet generating uniform magnetic fields; rather it inspects the liquid using a compact probe positioned on the wall of the bottle. For a variety of samples tested, the screening does not require detailed information on the expected content of the bottle.     

XANES speciation of mercury in three mining districts – Almadén,Asturias (Spain), Idria (Slovenia)

The mobility, bioavailability and toxicity of mercury in the environment strongly depend on the chemical species in which it is present in soil, sediments, water or air. In mining districts, differences in mobility and bioavailability of mercury mainly arise from the different type of mineralization and ore processing. In this work, synchrotron‐based X‐ray absorption near‐edge spectroscopy (XANES) has been taken advantage of to study the speciation of mercury in geological samples from three of the largest European mercury mining districts: Almadén (Spain), Idria (Slovenia) and Asturias (Spain). XANES has been complemented with a single extraction protocol for the determination of Hg mobility. Ore, calcines, dump material, soil, sediment and suspended particles from the three sites have been considered in the study. In the three sites, rather insoluble sulfide compounds (cinnabar and metacinnabar) were found to predominate. Minor amounts of more soluble mercury compounds (chlorides and sulfates) were also identified in some samples. Single extraction procedures have put forward a strong dependence of the mobility with the concentration of chlorides and sulfates. Differences in efficiency of roasting furnaces from the three sites have been found.     

Non‐intrusive reduced‐order modeling for multiphase porous media flows using Smolyak sparse grids

In this article, we describe a non‐intrusive reduction method for porous media multiphase flows using Smolyak sparse grids. This is the first attempt at applying such an non‐intrusive reduced‐order modelling (NIROM) based on Smolyak sparse grids to porous media multiphase flows. The advantage of this NIROM for porous media multiphase flows resides in that its non‐intrusiveness, which means it does not require modifications to the source code of full model. Another novelty is that it uses Smolyak sparse grids to construct a set of hypersurfaces representing the reduced‐porous media multiphase problem. This NIROM is implemented under the framework of an unstructured mesh control volume finite element multiphase model. Numerical examples show that the NIROM accuracy relative to the high‐fidelity model is maintained, whilst the computational cost is reduced by several orders of magnitude. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.