Anomalous electric-field effect and glassy behaviour in granular aluminium thin films: electron glass?

We present a study of non-equilibrium phenomena observed in the electrical conductance of insulating granular aluminium thin films. An anomalous field effect and its slow relaxation are studied in some detail. The phenomenology is very similar to the one already observed in indium oxide. The origin of the phenomena is discussed. In granular systems, the present experiments can naturally be interpreted along two different lines. One relies on a slow polarisation in the dielectric surrounding the metallic islands. The other one relies on a purely electronic mechanism: the formation of an electron Coulomb glass in the granular metal. More selective experiments and/or quantitative predictions about the Coulomb glass properties are still needed to definitely distinguish between the two scenarios.     

Prospects of Curcumin Nanoformulations in Cancer Management

There is increasing interest in the use of natural compounds with beneficial pharmacological effects for managing diseases. Curcumin (CUR) is a phytochemical that is reportedly effective against some cancers through its ability to regulate signaling pathways and protein expression in cancer development and progression. Unfortunately, its use is limited due to its hydrophobicity, low bioavailability, chemical instability, photodegradation, and fast metabolism. Nanoparticles (NPs) are drug delivery systems that can increase the bioavailability of hydrophobic drugs and improve drug targeting to cancer cells via different mechanisms and formulation techniques. In this review, we have discussed various CUR-NPs that have been evaluated for their potential use in treating cancers. Formulations reviewed include lipid, gold, zinc oxide, magnetic, polymeric, and silica NPs, as well as micelles, dendrimers, nanogels, cyclodextrin complexes, and liposomes, with an emphasis on their formulation and characteristics. CUR incorporation into the NPs enhanced its pharmaceutical and therapeutic significance with respect to solubility, absorption, bioavailability, stability, plasma half-life, targeted delivery, and anticancer effect. Our review shows that several CUR-NPs have promising anticancer activity; however, clinical reports on them are limited. We believe that clinical trials must be conducted on CUR-NPs to ensure their effective translation into clinical applications.     

Ambient noise cross correlation in free space: theoretical approach

It has been experimentally demonstrated that the Green's function between two points could be recovered using the cross-correlation function of the ambient noise measured at these two points. This paper investigates the theory behind this result in the simple case of a homogeneous medium with attenuation.     

Measurement of Lamb wave polarization using a one-dimensional scanning laser vibrometer (L)

A single head scanning laser Doppler vibrometer is used for the estimation of the polarization of the first symmetric (S(0)) and antisymmetric (A(0)) Lamb wave modes. The measurements at two known incidence angles are performed in order to resolve the two components of motion. Filtering in the frequency/wavenumber domain of the response recorded along a scan line separates the contributions from each mode and allows the evaluation of the corresponding elliptical trajectories of particle motion. Comparison between measured and analytically estimated trajectories validates the measurement technique and suggests its application for the development of material characterization and diagnostics tools.     

Compressive matched-field processing

Source localization by matched-field processing (MFP) generally involves solving a number of computationally intensive partial differential equations. This paper introduces a technique that mitigates this computational workload by "compressing" these computations. Drawing on key concepts from the recently developed field of compressed sensing, it shows how a low-dimensional proxy for the Green's function can be constructed by backpropagating a small set of random receiver vectors. Then the source can be located by performing a number of "short" correlations between this proxy and the projection of the recorded acoustic data in the compressed space. Numerical experiments in a Pekeris ocean waveguide are presented that demonstrate that this compressed version of MFP is as effective as traditional MFP even when the compression is significant. The results are particularly promising in the broadband regime where using as few as two random backpropagations per frequency performs almost as well as the traditional broadband MFP but with the added benefit of generic applicability. That is, the computationally intensive backpropagations may be computed offline independently from the received signals, and may be reused to locate any source within the search grid area.     

Enhancing the emergence rate of coherent wavefronts from ocean ambient noise correlations using spatio-temporal filters

Extracting coherent wavefronts between passive receivers using cross-correlations of ambient noise (CAN) provides a means for monitoring the seismoacoustic environment without using active sources. However, using cross-correlations between single receivers can require a long recording time in order to extract stable coherent arrivals from CAN. This becomes an issue if the propagation medium fluctuates significantly during the recording period. To address this issue, this article presents a general spatio-temporal filtering procedure to enhance the emergence rate for coherent wavefronts extracted from time-averaged ambient noise correlations between two spatially separated arrays. The robustness of this array-based CAN technique is investigated using ambient shipping noise recorded over 24?h in the frequency band [250-850 Hz] on two vertical line arrays deployed 143?m apart in shallow water (depth 20?m). Experimental results confirm that the array-based CAN technique can significantly reduce the recording duration (e.g., from 22?h to 30?min) required for extracting coherent wavefronts of sufficient amplitude (e.g., 20?dB over residual temporal fluctations) when compared to conventional CAN implementations between single pairs of hydrophones. These improvements of the CAN technique could benefit the development of noise-based ocean monitoring applications such as passive acoustic tomography.     

Alpha-induced fragmentation of 28Si in a statistical model

Within the context of a statistical model, that incorporates final-state interaction between a pair of fragments, we have calculated the energy spectra associated with the production of different isobaric pairs as a function of their lab kinetic energy and isobaric and elemental distributions of nuclei produced in the ⁴He$ + $²⁸Si reaction at cm incident energies of 102.7, 173.7, 300, 500, and 1000MeV. Double differential cross-section of isobars 16, 20, and 24 as a function of their lab kinetic energies at 30^° and the same for isobar 24 at 10^°, 30^°, 60^°, and 90^° have been calculated at cm incident energies of 102.7 and 173.7MeV and compared with the data of Woo et al. Calculated yields follow the trend of the data at each angle, and calculated angular distributions also reproduce the general trend of the observed ones. A key feature of the model is that it allows for fragments to be emitted in ground states as well as in excited states that are allowed by the conservation of energy. The analysis establishes that the fragments are emitted in excited state. The excitation energies for A = 24 and 16 are deduced from the data. The observed angular distributions for A = 7, 12, 16, 20, 24, and 28 are well accounted for assuming them to be emitted in excited states. The relative production probabilities for different elements and isobars are energy dependent. The yields for unstable elements, ⁵Li, ⁸Be, and ²⁶Al, are found to be significant. The relative fragmentation probabilities of all allowed isotopic pairs have been presented.     

Computational study of mixing behaviour of a turbulent jet issuing in a uniform counterflow at low velocity ratios

This paper proposes a computational study for the analysis of the velocity and the scalar concentration field of a round turbulent jet flowing into a uniform stream in opposite direction. The investigation is carried out for a range of low jet-to-counterflow velocity ratios; R = 1.3, 1.6, 2.2, 3.1 and 3.4. The Reynolds stress model is applied in numerical simulation to compare obtained results with experimental data from the literature. It is found that predicted results are in good agreement with the experimental data and that the jet fluid decays faster in the presence of a counterflow. The linearity between the penetration distance and the velocity ratio is verified and the axial fluctuating velocities along jet centreline appear to have two distinct peaks, except for the stronger counterflow. The enhanced mixing efficiency of the counterflowing jet is verified through the radial distribution of velocity and scalar concentration at different streamwise stations.     

Coherent backscattering effect from mid-frequency shallow water reverberation

The coherent backscattering (or backscattering enhancement) effect results from persistent interferences between multiply scattered waves propagating along reciprocal paths. This effect results in a doubling of the recorded backscattered intensity reflected exactly in the backward direction with respect to any other direction, after averaging intensity measurements collected over multiple emission angles. This letter presents experimental observations of the coherent backscattering effect from mid-frequency (3-4 kHz) shallow water reverberation measurements collected using a two-dimensional hydrophone array (8.4 × 1.5 m(2)). These results demonstrate the presence of coherent effects in shallow water reverberation not commonly accounted for.     

Structural health monitoring by extraction of coherent guided waves from diffuse fields

This letter points out that, although in the audio signal domain low-pass filtering has been used to prevent aliasing noise from entering the baseband of speech signals, an antialias process in the speech feature domain is still needed to prevent high modulation frequency components from entering the baseband of speech features. The existence of aliasing noise in speech features is revealed via spectral analysis of speech feature streams. A method for suppressing such aliasing noise is proposed. Experiments on large vocabulary speech recognition show that antialias processing of speech features can improve speech recognition, especially for noisy speech.