Spectrally resolved phase-shifting interferometry of transparent thin films: sensitivity of thickness measurements

Spectrally resolved white-light phase-shifting interference microscopy can be used for rapid and accurate measurements of the thickness profile of transparent thin-film layers deposited upon patterned structures exhibiting steps and discontinuities. We examine the sensitivity of this technique and show that it depends on the thickness of the thin-film layer as well as its refractive index. The results of this analysis are also valid for any other method based on measurements of the spectral phase such as wavelength scanning or white-light interferometry.     

Investigation on Phase Change Behavior of Paraffin Phase Change Material in a Spherical Capsule for Solar Thermal Storage Units

In this work, the melting and solidification behaviour of paraffin phase change material encapsulated in a stainless steel spherical container has been studied experimentally. A computational fluid dynamics analysis has also been performed for the encapsulated phase change material (PCM) during phase change process. In the melting process, the hot air, used as the heat transfer fluid enters the test section and flows over the spherical capsule resulting in the melting of phase change material. In the solidification process, the ambient air flows over the capsule and received heat from phase change material resulting in the solidification of phase change material. In the computational fluid dynamics, the constant wall boundary condition is employed for both melting (75°C) and solidification (36°C) processes since the internal conductive resistance offered by the PCM is much higher compared to the outer surface convective resistance. The time required for complete solidification and melting of the phase change material obtained from the computational fluid dynamics analysis are validated with the experimental results and a reasonable agreement is achieved. The reason for the deviation between the results are analyzed and reported.     

A simple demonstration of the Pancharatnam phase as a geometric phase

Abstract

To demonstrate the Pancharatnam phase as a geometric (Berry's) phase, each polarization state must be obtained by projecting the previous state on it. We describe a simple interferometric arrangement for such a demonstration which only uses a single rotation linear analyser to introduce a continuously variable phase difference between the two beams.     

Interference in the Single Photon Regime

Abstract

The two orthogonally polarized modes of a Zeeman laser can be combined at a polarizing beam-splitter to produce two outputs at the difference frequency. This paper presents some observations on these beats in the classical limit and in the single photon regime, where the mean separation of the photons exceeds the optical path length, and discusses their implications.     

White-light Phase-stepping Interferometry: Measurement of the Fractional Interference Order

Abstract

Intensity data obtained with white light and an achromatic phase shifter in an interferometric surface profiler can be used to locate the peak of the visibility curve as the test surface is moved in steps along the height axis. We show that the same intensity data can also be used to find the fractional interference order at each point on the test surface, at the position of the test surface nearest to the visibility peak and, hence, its height at that point, with a high degree of accuracy.     

Experimental investigation of a thermoacoustic refrigerator driven by a standing wave twin thermoacoustic prime mover

The objective of this study is to analyse the performance of thermoacoustic refrigerator (TAR) measured in terms of hot end temperature and temperature difference across refrigerator stack with two different spacing namely 0.4 mm and 0.8 mm and stack used in refrigerating section was made of low thermal conductivity materials namely Mylar sheet and photographic film & the experiments were carried out at 1 MPa pressure using helium as working fluid. High powered acoustic wave with frequency of 460 Hz and pressure amplitude of $?$0.07 MPa was obtained from twin thermoacoustic prime mover (TAPM) and this acoustic wave produced temperature difference of 16 °C across the Mylar sheet stack made of 0.4 mm spacing in refrigerator section. From this study, it has been inferred that twin TAPM can act as efficient drive for TAR.     

Graft copolymerization of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) onto polyester (PET) and simultaneous homopolymerization: A kinetic study. I

The kinetics of graft copolymerization of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) onto polyester (PET) and the simultaneous homopolymerization initiated by the potassium penoxomonosulfate (PMS)–ascorbic acid (H₂A) redox system were studied separately. Results on the graft copolymerization was adequately explained by a mechanism which also accounts for the reason for simultaneous homopolymerization. The observed homopolymerization results agreed with the proposal. Kinetic chain-length measurements on the graft copolymer and homopolymerization were used to evaluate the kinetic parameters. © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A Novel Coverage Improved Deployment Strategy for Wireless Sensor Network

Coverage of the bounded region gets importance in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Area coverage is based on effective surface coverage with a minimum number of sensor nodes. Most of the researchers contemplate the coverage region of interest as a square and manifest the radio ranges as a circle. The area of a circle is much higher than the area of a square because of the perimeter. To utilize the advantage of the circle, the coverage region of interest is presumed as a circle for sensor node deployment. This paper proposes a novel coverage improved disc shape deployment strategy. Comparative analysis has been observed between circle and square regions of interest based on the cumulative number of sensor nodes required to cover the entire region. A new strategy named as disc shape deployment strategy is also proposed. Traditional hexagon and strip-based deployment strategies are compared with the disc shape deployment strategy. The simulation result shows that the circle shape coverage region of interest extremely reduces the required number of sensor nodes. The proposed deployment strategy provides desirable coverage, and it requires few more sensor nodes than hexagon shape deployment strategy.

     

Energy‐efficient resource allocation for device‐to‐device communication through noncooperative game theory

Wireless network with high data rate applications has seen a rapid growth in recent years. This improved quality of service (QoS) leads to huge energy consumption in wireless network. Therefore, in order to have an energy‐efficient resource allocation in cellular system, a device‐to‐device (D2D) communication is the key component to improve the QoS. In this paper, we propose a noncooperative game (NCG) theory approach for resource allocation to improve energy efficiency (EE) of D2D pair. A three‐tier network with macrocell base station (MBS), femtocell base station (FBS), and D2D pair is considered, which shares the uplink resource block. A resource allocation strategy with constraints is arrived, which maintains minimum throughput for each user in the network. The proposed resource allocation strategy optimizes the EE of D2D pair in the three‐tier network, which achieves Nash equilibrium (NE) and Pareto optimality (PO). Simulation results validate that EE is uniform and optimum for all D2D pair, which converges to NE when channel is static and it converges to PO when the channel is dynamic.     

I/O Acceleration via Multi-Tiered Data Buffering and Prefetching

Modern High-Performance Computing(HPC)systems are adding extra layers to the memory and storage hierarchy,named deep memory and storage hierarchy(DMSH),to increase I/O performance.New hardware technologies,such as NVMe and SSD,have been introduced in burst buffer installations to reduce the pressure for external storage and boost the burstiness of modern I/O systems.The DMSH has demonstrated its strength and potential in practice.However,each layer of DMSH is an independent heterogeneous system and data movement among more layers is significantly more complex even without considering heterogeneity.How to efficiently utilize the DMSH is a subject of research facing the HPC community.Further,accessing data with a high-throughput and low-latency is more imperative than ever.Data prefetching is a well-known technique for hiding read latency by requesting data before it is needed to move it from a high-latency medium(e.g.,disk)to a low-latency one(e.g.,main memory).However,existing solutions do not consider the new deep memory and storage hierarchy and also suffer from under-utilization of prefetching resources and unnecessary evictions.Additionally,existing approaches implement a client-pull model where understanding the application's I/O behavior drives prefetching decisions.Moving towards exascale,where machines run multiple applications concurrently by accessing files in a workflow,a more data-centric approach resolves challenges such as cache pollution and redundancy.In this paper,we present the design and implementation of Hermes:a new,heterogeneous-aware,multi-tiered,dynamic,and distributed I/O buffering system.Hermes enables,manages,supervises,and,in some sense,extends I/O buffering to fully integrate into the DMSH.We introduce three novel data placement policies to efficiently utilize all layers and we present three novel techniques to perform memory,metadata,and communication management in hierarchical buffering systems.Additionally,we demonstrate the benefits of a truly hierarchical data prefetcher that adopts a server-push approach to data prefetching.Our evaluation shows that,in addition to automatic data movement through the hierarchy,Hermes can significantly accelerate I/O and outperforms by more than 2x state-of-the-art buffering platforms.Lastly,results show 10%-35%performance gains over existing prefetchers and over 50%when compared to systems with no prefetching.