Spectral anomalies and spectral switches of partially coherent and polychromatic light diffracted at an aperture

Inrecentyearsanewbranchofmodernphysicalopticscalledsingularoptics[1]hasbeendeveloped.In2002theworkinsingularopticswasextendedfrommonochromaticlighttospatiallyfullycoherentandpolychromaticlightbyGburetal.[2—4].Itwasfoundthat,whenaconverging,spatiallyfullycoherentandpolychromaticsphericalwaveisdiffractedatanaperture,anomalousspectralchangestakeplaceclosetozerosoftheintensityinthefarfield;i.e.thespectrumisredshiftedatsomepoints,blueshiftedatothers,andsplitintotwolineselsewhere.Thepredictionsofsp…     

First Evidence for Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay

Double beta decay is indispensable to solve the question of the neutrino mass matrix together with oscillation experiments. Recent analysis of the most sensitive experiment since nine years—the HEIDELBERG-MOSCOW experiment in Gran-Sasso—yields a first indication for the neutrinoless decay mode. This result is the first evidence for lepton number violation and proves the neutrino to be a Majorana particle. We give the present status of the analysis in this report. It excludes several of the neutrino mass scenarios allowed from present neutrino oscillation experiments—only degenerate scenarios and those with inverse mass hierarchy survive. This result allows neutrinos to still play an important role as dark matter in the Universe. To improve the accuracy of the present result, considerably enlarged experiments are required, such as GENIUS. A GENIUS Test Facility has been funded and will come into operation by early 2003.     

Stable bundle extensions on elliptic Calabi–Yau threefolds

We construct stable bundle extensions on elliptically fibered Calabi–Yau threefolds. We show that these bundles can solve the topological anomaly constraint in heterotic string theory without the need for invoking background five-branes.     

A multi-wall carbon nanotube–molecular semiconductor composite for bi-layer organic solar cells

A water-soluble composite of oxidised multi-wall carbon nanotubes and sulphonic acid sodium salt derivatised copper phthalocyanine for application in bi-layer organic solar cells is reported. Measurements of the topography of thin films of this novel material and of the valence electronic structure of its two components are used to rationalise the photovoltaic characteristics of a model organic heterojunction utilising the nanocomposite as the hole-extracting electrode and donor layer.     

The Super-Kamiokande experiment

Super-Kamiokande has accumulated data on atmospheric neutrinos and solar neutrinos for 1117–1289 live days. We present updated results on the flavor ratio, the zenith angle distribution of atmospheric neutrinos and the zenith angle distribution of upward going muons. We also present results on the energy spectrum and the day–night variation of solar neutrinos. The data on atmospheric neutrinos show clear evidence of neutrino oscillation.     

Improving the efficiency of thin film tandem solar cells by plasmonic intermediate reflectors

Thin film tandem solar cells made of amorphous and microcrystalline silicon provide renewable energy at the benefit of low material consumption. As a drawback, these materials do not posses the high carrier mobilities of their crystalline counterpart which limits the feasible material thickness. For maintaining the light absorption as high as possible, photon management is required. Here we show that metallic nanodiscs that sustain localized plasmon polaritons can increase the efficiency of such solar cells if they are incorporated into the dielectric intermediate reflector separating the top and the bottom cell. We provide quantitative estimates for the possible absorption enhancement of optimized bi-periodic nanodiscs that are feasible for fabrication. Emphasis is also put on discussing the impact of obliquely incident sun light on the solar cell performance.     

Galactic cosmic-ray modulation and solar-terrestrial relationships

Summary Representative examples of the Italian scientific undertaking on galactic cosmic-ray modulation within the GIFCO projects are given. Also current ideas from the international community on long-term effects are discussed. To speed up publication, the proofs were not sent to the authors and were supervised by the Scientific Committee.     

A New Deep Dual Temporal Domain Adaptation Method for Online Detection of Bearings Early Fault

With the quick development of sensor technology in recent years, online detection of early fault without system halt has received much attention in the field of bearing prognostics and health management. While lacking representative samples of the online data, one can try to adapt the previously-learned detection rule to the online detection task instead of training a new rule merely using online data. As one may come across a change of the data distribution between offline and online working conditions, it is challenging to utilize the data from different working conditions to improve detection accuracy and robustness. To solve this problem, a new online detection method of bearing early fault is proposed in this paper based on deep transfer learning. The proposed method contains an offline stage and an online stage. In the offline stage, a new state assessment method is proposed to determine the period of the normal state and the degradation state for whole-life degradation sequences. Moreover, a new deep dual temporal domain adaptation (DTDA) model is proposed. By adopting a dual adaptation strategy on the time convolutional network and domain adversarial neural network, the DTDA model can effectively extract domain-invariant temporal feature representation. In the online stage, each sequentially-arrived data batch is directly fed into the trained DTDA model to recognize whether an early fault occurs. Furthermore, a health indicator of target bearing is also built based on the DTDA features to intuitively evaluate the detection results. Experiments are conducted on the IEEE Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Challenge 2012 bearing dataset. The results show that, compared with nine state-of-the-art fault detection and diagnosis methods, the proposed method can get an earlier detection location and lower false alarm rate.