Focusing PVDF transducers for acoustic microscopy

A focusing transducer based on a 9-µm thick PVDF foil was fabricated and tested for performance. The transducer operates in the frequency range of 20–160 MHz. For operation at 78 MHz in water, a lateral resolution of 27.5 µm and a vertical resolution of 35 µm have been observed. Acoustic images of a transistor have been obtained with the focusing PVDF transducer.     

Impaired motor cortex inhibition in patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Evidence from paired transcranial magnetic stimulation

We investigated 14 patients with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by paired conditioning-test transcranial magnetic stimulation to test the hypothesis that the motor cortex is hyperexcitable in ALS. Intracortical (corticocortical) inhibition was significantly less in the ALS group than in an age-matched healthy control group (85.3 +/- 27.0% versus 45.2 +/- 15.5%, respectively; p < 0.0001). In contrast, intracortical facilitation, motor threshold, and cortical silent period duration in the ALS patients were not different from the control group. We suggest that the selective abnormality of intracortical inhibition is best compatible with an impaired function of inhibitory interneuronal circuits in the motor cortex that in turn renders the corticomotoneuron hyperexcitable.     

Near-Field and Plane-Wave Electromagnetic Coupling into a Slotted Circular Cylinder: Hard or TE Polarization

An analytically tractable model is proposed in this initial study of the electromagnetic phenomena that control our ability to synthesize, by using a near-field source, the effect of plane-wave coupling through an aperture into the interior of a vehicle under test. An integral equation for the tangential electric field in the slot aperture of a perfectly conducting, infinitesimally thin-walled circular cylinder is solved using a basis set of Chebyshev polynomials that are properly weighted according to the static edge condition. The resulting matrix elements from a Galerkin procedure are computed to high precision upon extracting the logarithmic singularity of the kernel of the integral operator. Exact expressions for the matrix elements, in the form of rapidly convergent series of elementary terms, are constructed by isolating another logarithmic function of the aperture width. A minimization of the mean-square error between the true plane-wave response and that due to a near-field line-source establishes the optimal complex source strength of the near-field source     

Side-Track Erasure Processes in Perpendicular Recording

In perpendicular recording, substantial erasure of the stored data patterns can occur during the writing process. Among all those erasure processes, side-track erasure (STE) is one of the critical issues in drive head/media integration. Unlike the adjacent track erasure (ATE) process, the locations of the STE affected areas are often many tens of tracks away from the central writing track location. In this work, we report on an experimental investigation and quantification of the general attributes and the origins of the STE processes in various situations. Particularly, we thoroughly characterize some distinctive signatures and behaviors of STE processes by employing both the amplitude- and bit-error-rate-based STE measurement methods in combination with a novel magnetic force microscope characterization technique     

Geolocation and pointing accuracy analysis for the WindSat sensor

Geolocation and pointing accuracy analyses of the WindSat flight data are presented. The two topics were intertwined in the flight data analysis and will be addressed together. WindSat has no unusual geolocation requirements relative to other sensors, but its beam pointing knowledge accuracy is especially critical to support accurate polarimetric radiometry. Pointing accuracy was improved and verified using geolocation analysis in conjunction with scan bias analysis. Two methods were needed to properly identify and differentiate between data time tagging and pointing knowledge errors. Matchups comparing coastlines indicated in imagery data with their known geographic locations were used to identify geolocation errors. These coastline matchups showed possible pointing errors with ambiguities as to the true source of the errors. Scan bias analysis of U, the third Stokes parameter, and of vertical and horizontal polarizations provided measurement of pointing offsets resolving ambiguities in the coastline matchup analysis. Several geolocation and pointing bias sources were incrementally eliminated resulting in pointing knowledge and geolocation accuracy that met all design requirements.     

Surface leakage currents in SiN/sub x/ passivated AlGaN/GaN HFETs

A novel guarded surface leakage test structure is used to isolate the surface and bulk leakage contributions to gate current in AlGaN/GaN HFETs. Passivation with various recipes of SiN/sub x/ always resulted in the commonly observed increase in gate leakage, which was found to be dominated by bulk leakage through the AlGaN. However, high temperature deposited SiN/sub x/ recipes gave a 1-2 orders reduction in surface leakage, whereas low temperature deposition gave an increase. Gate lag measurements were found to correlate closely with the surface leakage component, giving direct evidence that the key device problem of current slump is associated with current flow at the AlGaN surface.     

Studies on the corrosion behavior of cerium-implanted zircaloy-4 with GAXRD

In order to study the influence of cerium ion implantation on the aqueous corrosion behavior of zircaloy-4, specimens were implanted by cerium ions with a fluence range from 1×10¹⁶ to 1×10¹⁷ ions/cm² at maximum 150°C, using MEVVA source at an extracted voltage of 40 kV. The valence and elements penetration distribution of the surface layer were analyzed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and auger electron spectroscopy (AES) respectively. Glancing angle X-ray diffraction (GAXRD) was employed to examine the phase transformation due to the cerium ion implantation in the oxide films. Three-sweep potentiodynamic polarization measurement was employed to value the aqueous corrosion resistance of zircaloy-4 in a 1 N H₂SO₄ solution. It was found that a significant improvement in the aqueous corrosion behavior of zircaloy-4 implanted with cerium ions compared with that of the as-received zircaloy-4. The improvement effect will declined with raising the implantation fluence. The bigger is the fluence, the less is the improvement. Finally, the mechanism of the corrosion behavior of the cerium-implanted zircaloy-4 is discussed.     

Characterization and comparison of PECVD silicon nitride and silicon oxynitride dielectric for MIM capacitors

In this letter, we report on the electrical characteristic and the comparison of the metal-insulator-metal (MIM) capacitors with PECVD silicon nitride (SiN) and silicon oxynitride (SiON). Both capacitors are found to exhibit low leakage and high breakdown field strength, as well as absence of dispersive behavior, good linearity, and comparable quality factor behaviors.     

Speaker identification based on adaptive discriminative vector quantisation

A novel adaptive discriminative vector quantisation technique for speaker identification (ADVQSI) is introduced. In the training mode of ADVQSI, for each speaker, the speech feature vector space is divided into a number of subspaces. The feature space segmentation is based on the difference between the probability distribution of the speech feature vectors from each speaker and that from all speakers in the speaker identification (SI) group. Then, an optimal discriminative weight, which represents the subspace's role in SI, is calculated for each subspace of each speaker by employing adaptive techniques. The largest template differences between speakers in the SI group are achieved by using optimal discriminative weights. In the testing mode of ADVQSI, discriminative weighted average vector quantisation (VQ) distortions are used for SI decisions. The performance of ADVQSI is analysed and tested experimentally. The experimental results confirm the performance improvement employing the proposed technique in comparison with existing VQ techniques for SI and recently reported discriminative VQ techniques for SI (DVQSI)     

Simulation of cup-cone fracture using the cohesive model

The cohesive model is used for the prediction of the crack path during stable crack extension in ductile materials. The problem of crack-path deviation is investigated by means of simulation of crack propagation in a round tensile bar. The respective phenomenon is known as cup-cone fracture. It is shown that the model is able to predict the failure mechanism, which consists of normal fracture in the center and combined normal/shear fracture in the so-called “shear lips” at the specimen’s rim. The damage evolution and crack path predicted by the model are presented. The effect of the normal and shear failure parameters on the crack-deflection point and several aspects of the finite element mesh are discussed.