Recent trends in optical data processing

Optical data processing is an advancing field which has received much attention in recent years. Optical techniques have already shown their applicability in target identification, advanced signal processing operations and advanced linear algebra operations. The potential capabilities of processing of data using photons instead of electrons as the carrier of information have established, beyond any doubt, that the optical techniques will be the next generation technology surpassing electronic techniques in some important areas such as air traffic control, missile guidance and remote sensing. Although great strides have been made in all the areas of optical data processing, the goal of high performance, high speed and very accurate all-optical computers would be realised only around the year 1995. The main difficulty is that the required materials for high resolution and fast spatial light modulators and optical interconnects are yet to be perfected. The present paper reviews the recent trends and the future prospects of optical data processing.     

Topological investigations of molar excess volumes of quinoline with alkanols

Excess volumes V ^E of binary liquid mixtures of quinoline with alkanols have been determined from densities at 30°C as a function of composition. The excess volumes are negative over the whole mole fraction range for all the mixtures and decrease with increasing length of alkanol (C₁–C₁₀). The V^E data have been analyzed in terms of an approach which uses graph theoretical connectivity parameters of the third degrees for two components. The analysis gives information regarding associated species in the pure state and in the mixture. It is suggested that, in the mixture state, no change occurs in the association of alkanols.     

The acoustic spectrophonometer: a novel bioanalytical technique based on multifrequency acoustic devices

A measurement technique similar to optical absorption spectroscopy but based on evanescent acoustic waves is described in this paper. This format employs a planar spiral coil to vibrate a single crystal of quartz from 6 to 400 MHz, in order to measure multifrequency acoustic spectra. Consistency with the defined Sauerbrey and Kanazawa terms K1 and K2 when applied to multiple frequencies was found for these specific operating conditions in terms of a significant fit between the measured and calculated values: For an IgG surface density of 13.5 ng mm(-2) the measured value of K1 is 22.5 x 10(-6) and the calculated value is 20.4 x 10(-6), whilst for glycerol viscous loadings of 5.131 cP the measured value of K2 is 0.47 and the calculated value is 0.54. Thus for these specific surface loadings the multifrequency data fits to the predictions of the Sauerbrey model to within 10% and to Kanazawa model within 13%. However collective frequency shifts for 5.131 cP solutions of sucrose, dextran and glucose were found to exhibit an unanticipated additional variability (R2 < 0.4) with frequency, but retained a square root of frequency dependency within a factor 2 of the interpolated K2 values. The response to the 5.131 cP dextran solution was found to be significantly below the other isoviscous solutions, with a substantially reduced frequency shift and K2 value than would be expected from its bulk viscosity. In comparison with these viscous solutions, IgG protein films consistently produced linear frequency shifts with little scatter (R2 > 0.96) that were proportional to the operating frequency, and fully consistent with the Sauerbrey model under these specific conditions. A t-test value of 14.52 was calculated from the variance and mean of the two groups, and demonstrates that the acoustic spectrophonometer can be used to distinguish between the acoustic impedance characteristics of two chemical systems that are not clearly differentiable at a single operating frequency.