The scanning acoustic microprobe: II. Application to the measurement and characterization of a piston reflector

In a pulsed ultrasound beam, echoes detected from a flat, circular piston of arbitrary size depend on the time-space characteristics of the entire pulse-echo measurement system, being a function of as many parameters as it takes to accurately define the system. In the limiting case of a target that is small relative to the spatial extent of an interrogating plane wave, an echo pattern is known to be a relatively simple function of the dimensionless product k0b, where k0 is the wave number and b is the radius of the target. In a companion paper preceding this one [F. E. Barber, J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 90, 8-17 (1991)], the author has described the scanning acoustic microprobe, a pulse-echo system in which the time-space properties of the interrogating waves are specified completely by k0 and a single additional parameter s0, which is the characteristic radius of a spherically symmetric, Gaussian-distributed scattering volume. In this system, the reflection pattern of a flat, circular piston of any arbitrary size is thus a function of two dimensionless parameters, namely k0b and b/s0. In this paper, this functional relationship is derived, a physical system is described, and analytical and experimental results are reported. It is shown that the diameter, orientation, and impedance mismatch properties of this simple target can be measured unambiguously over a range of target sizes from about a wavelength (2 pi/k0) to a beam diameter (about 3s0). For a typical ultrasound system, this is about a 5-1 range; i.e., a range extending to target sizes about five times smaller than can be detected in a simple B-mode imaging system.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Screw dislocation in spherical particle

The elastic fields generated by a straight-line screw dislocation axially arranged in a spherical particle have been calculated and analyzed. Some features of the distribution of elastic fields in this case and in the case of a screw dislocation lying along the axis of a cylindrical whisker are similar. The elastic energies per unit dislocation length differ slightly in the two cases. This corroborates the validity of application of some of the results obtained for screw dislocations in elastic cylinders to the study of properties of screw dislocations in equiaxed particles.Authors are very indebted to dr. A. B. Lebedev for his kind support.     

Determination of the rate of nonradiative relaxation,processes on excitation of electronic states in YAG:Nd3+

Translated from Zhurnal Prikladnoi Spektroskopii, Vol. 54, No. 2, pp. 229–233, February, 1991.     

Polarizability of the fine-structure components of low excited states of the F, Cl, and Br atoms

The dynamic scalar, tensor, and pseudovector polarizabilities of the low excited states (ns)⁴ P _J of the F, Cl, and Br atoms (n = 3, 4, and 5, respectively) are calculated for all the levels of the fine-structure multiplets with J = 5/2, 3/2, and 1/2 with the use of the quantum detect Green’s function, proposed earlier.     

Convergence of the method of partition of regions for second-order elliptic conjugation problems

Translated from Ukrainskii Matematicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 41, No. 8, pp. 1137–1141, August, 1989.     

Temperature distribution in the bright spot of the optical discharge in an optical fiber

2D simulation of the optical discharge propagation in an optical fiber is performed. In contrast to the previous works, the temperature dependences of the transfer coefficient are taken into account for the bright-spot plasma. The results are compared with the recently published measurements of the spatial distribution of the bright-spot radiation intensity. Good agreement is obtained for the discharge propagation velocity and the dependence of the bright-spot size on the laser power.     

Ionization of Hydrogen and Helium Atoms in Collisions with Relativistic Structural Heavy Ions

Based on the eikonal approximation, cross sections for single and double ionization of hydrogen and helium atoms in collisions with structural multiply charged heavy ions moving with relativistic velocities are calculated. In the present paper, the structural ions are taken to mean the ions with partially filled electronic shells. It is demonstrated that a consideration of the ion charge extension may noticeably change the corresponding cross sections compared to the cross sections for ionization by point ions having the same charges and energies.     

Analysis of Static Simulated Annealing Algorithms

Generalized hill climbing (GHC) algorithms provide a framework for modeling local search algorithms to address intractable discrete optimization problems. This paper introduces a measure for determining the expected number of iterations to visit a predetermined objective function level, given that an inferior objective function level has been reached in a finite number of iterations. A variation of simulated annealing (SA), termed static simulated annealing (S²A), is analyzed using this measure. S²A uses a fixed cooling schedule during the algorithm execution. Though S²A is probably nonconvergent, its finite-time performance can be assessed using the finite-time performance measure defined in this paper.