Photoconductivity,photoluminescence and optical Kerr nonlinear effects in zinc oxide films containing chromium nanoclusters

Chromium doped zinc oxide thin solid films were deposited on soda–lime glass substrates. The photoconductivity of the material and its influence on the optical behavior was evaluated. A non-alkoxide sol–gel synthesis approach was used for the preparation of the samples. An enhancement of the photoluminescence response exhibited by the resulting photoconductive films with embedded chromium nanoclusters is presented. The modification in the photoconduction induced by a 445 nm wavelength was measured and then associated with the participation of the optical absorptive response. In order to investigate the third order optical nonlinearities of the samples, a standard time-resolved Optical Kerr Gate configuration with 80 fs pulses at 830 nm was used and a quasi-instantaneous pure electronic nonlinearity without the contribution of nonlinear optical absorption was observed. We estimate that from the inclusion of Cr nanoclusters into the sample results a strong optical Kerr effect originated by quantum confinement. The large photoluminescence response and the important refractive nonlinearity of the photoconductive samples seem to promise potential applications for the development of multifunctional all-optical nanodevices.     

Ultrafast photophysics of the isolated indole molecule

The relaxation dynamics of the isolated indole molecule has been tracked by femtosecond time-resolved ionization. The excitation region explored (283-243 nm) covers three excited states: the two ππ* L(b) and L(a) states, and the dark πσ* state with dissociative character. In the low energy region (λ > 273 nm) the transients collected reflect the absorption of the long living L(b) state. The L(a) state is met 1000-1500 cm(-1) above the L(b) origin, giving rise to an ultrafast lifetime of 40 fs caused by the internal conversion to the lower L(b) minimum through a conical intersection. An additional ~400 fs component, found at excitation wavelengths shorter than 263 nm, is ascribed to dynamics along the πσ* state, which is likely populated through coupling to the photoexcited L(a) state. The study provides a general view of the indole photophysics, which is driven by the interplay between these three excited surfaces and the ground state.     

Multilevel regularization of wavelet based fitting of scattered data – some experiments

In [6], an adaptive method to approximate unorganized clouds of points by smooth surfaces based on wavelets has been described. The general fitting algorithm operates on a coarse-to-fine basis. It selects on each refinement level in a first step a reduced number of wavelets which are appropriate to represent the features of the data set. In a second step, the fitting surface is constructed as the linear combination of the wavelets which minimizes the distance to the data in a least squares sense. This is followed by a thresholding procedure on the wavelet coefficients to discard those which are too small to contribute much to the surface representation. In this paper, we firstly generalize this strategy to a classically regularized least squares functional by adding a Sobolev norm, taking advantage of the capability of wavelets to characterize Sobolev spaces of even fractional order. After recalling the usual cross-validation technique to determine the involved smoothing parameters, some examples of fitting severely irregularly distributed data, synthetically produced and of geophysical origin, are presented. In order to reduce computational costs, we then introduce a multilevel generalized cross-validation technique which goes beyond the Sobolev formulation and exploits the hierarchical setting based on wavelets. We illustrate the performance of the new strategy on some geophysical data. AMS subject classification 65T60, 62G09, 93E14, 93E24We gratefully acknowledge the support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (KU 1028/7 1 and SFB 611) and by the Basque Government.     

Boundary effects on convergence rates for Tikhonov regularization

We consider the Tikhonov regularizer f_λ of a smooth function f ε H^2m[0, 1], defined as the solution (see [1]) to We prove that if f^(j)(0) = f^(j)(1) = 0, J = m, …, k < 2m − 1, then ¦f − f_λ¦_j² Rλ^{(2k − 2j + 3)/2m}, J = 0, …, m. A detailed analysis is given of the effect of the boundary on convergence rates.     

Crystallized schrödinger cat states

Crystallized Schrödinger cat states (male and female) are introduced on the base of extension of group construction for the even and odd coherent states of the electromagnetic field oscillator. The Wigner and Q functions are calculated and some are plotted forC ₂,C ₃,C ₄,C ₅,C _3v Schrödinger cat states. Quadrature means and dispersions for these states are calculated and squeezing and correlation phenomena are studied. Photon distribution functions for these states are given explicitly and are plotted for several examples. A strong oscillatory behavior of the photon distribution function for some field amplitudes is found in the new type of states.     

“Magic” Dispersion Maps with Distributed Raman Amplification

We analyze pulse propagation in an optical fiber with a periodic dispersion map and distributed amplification. Using an asymptotic theory and a momentum method, we identify a family of dispersion management schemes that are advantageous for massive multichannel soliton transmission. For the case of two-step dispersion maps with distributed Raman amplification to compensate for the fiber loss, we find special schemes that have optimal (chirp-free) launch point locations that are independent of the fiber dispersion. Despite the variation of dispersion with wavelength due to the fiber dispersion slope, the transmission in several different channels can be optimized simultaneously using the same optimal launch point. The theoretical predictions are verified by direct numerical simulations. The obtained results are applied to a practical multichannel transmission system.