Optical-force-induced artifacts in scanning probe microscopy

In the practice of near-field scanning probe microscopy, it is typically assumed that the distance regulation is independent of the optical signal. However, we demonstrate that these two signals are entangled due to the inherent action of optically induced force. This coupling leads to artifacts in both estimating the magnitude of optical fields and recording topographic maps.     

Evidence for strong intramolecular hydrogen bonding in some quinoline derivatives

Several analogues of quinoline-8-carboxamide were examined by ¹H NMR and IR in order to establish structural requirements for strong intramolecular hydrogen bonding.     

Synthesis and characterization of novel internal surface reversed-phase silica supports for high-performance liquid chromatography

An original synthetic method was developed for the preparation of a family of six novel deactivated restricted-access materials (RAMs), belonging to the group of the internal surface reversed-phase (ISRP) supports. The supports (ISRP-RAM phases A-F) have an alkyl-chain (14 methylenes) with two embedded ureido groups bound only to the internal surfaces of the porous silica, and polyvinyl alcoholic groups (PVA, 100,000-->22,000 molecular weight) chemically bound to the external surfaces. The average pore diameters of the prepared ISRP-RAM supports, calculated by inverse size-exclusion chromatography, ranged between 49 A and 88 A, and were able to exclude macromolecules heavier than about 24000 Da (such as serum proteins) from the pores. The novel supports were designed for the determination of a semi-synthetic anticancer drug of the camptothecin family in human plasma, but they represent universal ISRP-RAM supports not limited to such class of compounds.     

Estimating topological charge of propagating vortex from single-shot non-imaged speckle

Encoding information using the topological charge of vortex beams has been proposed for optical communications. The conservation of the topological charge on propagation and the detection of the topological charge by a receiver are significant in these applications and have been well established in free-space. However, when vortex beams enter a diffuser,the wavefront is distorted, leading to a challenge in the conservation and detection of the topological charge. Here, we present a technique to measure the value of the topological charge of a vortex beam obscured in the randomly scattered light. The results of the numerical simulations and experiments are presented and are in good agreement. In particular, only a single-shot measurement is required to detect the topological charge of vortex beams, indicating that the method is applicable to a dynamic diffuser.     

Existence of self-Cheeger sets on Riemannian manifolds

Let \(({\mathcal M},g)\) be a smooth compact Riemannian manifold of dimension \(N\ge 2\). We prove the existence of a family \((\Omega _\varepsilon )_{\varepsilon \in (0,\varepsilon _0)}\) of self-Cheeger sets in \(({\mathcal M},g)\). The domains \(\Omega _\varepsilon \subset {\mathcal M}\) are perturbations of geodesic balls of radius \(\varepsilon \) centered at \(p \in {\mathcal M}\), and in particular, if \(p_0\) is a non-degenerate critical point of the scalar curvature of g, then the family \((\partial \Omega _\varepsilon )_{\varepsilon \in (0,\varepsilon _0)}\) constitutes a smooth foliation of a neighborhood of \(p_0\).     

Ultraweak-absorption microscopy of a single semiconductor quantum dot in the midinfrared range

We show that we can measure the room temperature ultraweak absorption of a single buried semiconductor quantum dot. This is achieved by monitoring the deformation field induced by the absorption of midinfrared laser pulses and locally detected with an atomic force microscope tip. The absorption is spectrally and spatially resolved around lambda approximately 10 microm wavelength with 60 nm lateral resolution (lambda/150). The electronic S-D intersublevel absorption of a single quantum dot is identified around 120 meV and exhibits a homogeneous linewidth of approximately 10 meV at room temperature.     

Polariton laser using single micropillar GaAs-GaAlAs semiconductor cavities

Polariton lasing is demonstrated on the zero-dimensional states of single GaAs/GaAlAs micropillar cavities. Under nonresonant excitation, the measured polariton ground-state occupancy is found as large as 10(4). Changing the spatial excitation conditions, competition between several polariton lasing modes is observed, ruling out Bose-Einstein condensation. When the polariton state occupancy increases, the emission blueshift is the signature of self-interaction within the half-light half-matter polariton lasing mode.     

Enhancement Factor in the Light Backscattered by Fractal Aggregated Media

We investigate the phenomenon of the enhanced backscattering of light from soft sediments of fractal clusters. The clusters consist of spherical PMMA particles with the diameter of 0.4 μ, aggregated in aqueous solutions of NaCl. We found that the kinetics of aggregation, which determines the average cluster size in sediments, is controlled by the salt concentration and that the sediments are mutually self-similar media. In comparison to uniform random media, specific features for the enhancement peaks are revealed. It is found that the peak line-shape reflects the particularities of the density of scatterers in a fractal-like medium. It is shown experimentally that the enhancement factor in the light backscattered by fractal aggregated media is sensitive to the average cluster size. On this basis, we suggest a possible way to distinguish between mutually self-similar media.     

A new exact algorithm for the vehicle routing problem based onq-paths andk-shortest paths relaxations

We consider the basic Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP) in which a fleet ofM identical vehicles stationed at a central depot is to be optimally routed to supply customers with known demands subject only to vehicle capacity constraints. In this paper, we present an exact algorithm for solving the VRP that uses lower bounds obtained from a combination of two relaxations of the original problem which are based on the computation ofq-paths andk-shortest paths. A set of reduction tests derived from the computation of these bounds is applied to reduce the size of the problem and to improve the quality of the bounds. The resulting lower bounds are then embedded into a tree-search procedure to solve the problem optimally. Computational results are presented for a number of problems taken from the literature. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in solving problems involving up to about 50 customers and in providing tight lower bounds for problems up to about 150 customers.