A new method for the estimation of oceanic mixed-layer depth using shipboard X-band radar images

Shipboard X-band radar images acquired on 24 June 2009 are used to study nonlinear internal wave characteristics in the northeastern South China Sea. The studied images show three nonlinear internal waves in a packet. A method based on the Radon Transform technique is introduced to calculate internal wave parameters such as the direction of propagation and internal wave velocity from backscatter images. Assuming that the ocean is a two-layer finite depth system, we can derive the mixed-layer depth by applying the internal wave velocity to the mixed-layer depth formula. Results show reasonably good agreement with in-situ thermistor chain and conductivity-temperature-depth data sets.

Classical correlated imaging from the perspective of coherent-mode representation

We use coherent-mode representation of partially coherent fields to analyze correlated imaging with classical light sources. This formalism is very useful to study the imaging quality. By decomposing the unknown object as the superposition of different coherent modes, the components corresponding to small eigenvalues cannot be well imaged. The generated images depend crucially on the distribution of the eigenvalues of the coherent-mode representation of the source and the decomposition coefficients of the objects. Three kinds of correlated imaging schemes are analyzed numerically.

Experimental study of the Talbot effect under femtosecond laser illumination

Experimental results of the Talbot effect of an amplitude grating under femtosecond laser illumination are reported. Compared with Talbot image under continuous wave (CW) illumination, Talbot images under femtosecond laser illumination are different due to the wide spectral bandwidth and the Talbot images are more distorted at longer Talbot distances. The spectrums and the pulsewidths of femtosecond laser pulses are measured with the frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) apparatus. Experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical analysis. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The improvement of thick oxidized porous silicon layer growth process - art. no. 60290S

Oxidizing thick porous silicon layer into silicon dioxide is a timesaving and low-cost process for producing thick silicon dioxide layer used in silicon-based optical waveguide devices. The solution of H2O2 is proposed to post-treat thick porous silicon (PS) films. The prepared PS layer as the cathode is applied about 10 mA/cm(2) current in mixture of ethanol, HF, and H2O2 solutions, in order to improve the stability and the smoothness of the surface. With the low-temperature dry-O-2 pre-oxidizations and high-temperature wet O-2 oxidizations process, a high-quality SiO2 30 mu m thickness layer that fit for the optical waveguide device was prepared. The SEM images show significant improved smoothness on the surface of oxidized PS thick films, the SiO2 film has a stable and uniformity reflex index that measured by the prism coupler, the uniformity of the reflex index in different place of the wafer is about 0.0003.

Effect of noncoherent islands on the optical properties of the 1.3 mu m InAs/GaAs quantum dots during rapid thermal annealing

The effect of thermal annealing of InAs/GaAs quantum dots (QDs) with emission wavelength at 1.3 mu m have been investigated by photoluminescence (PL) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM measurements. There is a dramatic change in the A spectra when the annealing temperature is raised up to 800 degrees C: an accelerated blushifit of the main emission peak of QDs together with an inhomogeneous broadening of the linewidth. The TEM images shows that the lateral size of normal QDs decreases as the annealing temperature is increased, while the noncoherent islands increase their size and densit. A small fraction of the relative large QDs contain dislocations when the annealing temperature increases up to 800 degrees C. The latter leads to the strong decrease of the PL intensity.

Bending of jets in the QSO NRAO 530

We present radio images of NRAO 530 on scales ranging from pc to kpc. The observations include the EVN at 5 GHz, the VLBA at 1.6, 8.6 and 15 GHz, the MERLIN at 1.6 and 5 GHz, and the VLA at 5, 8.4, 15, 22, and 43 GHz. The VLBI images show a core-jet structure with an oscillating trajectory on a scale of about 30 mas north of the strongest compact component (core). Superluminal motions are detected in five of the jet components with apparent velocities in the range of 13.6 to 25.2c. A new component is detected at 15 GHz with the VLBA observations, which appears to be associated with the outburst in 2002. Significant polarized emission is detected around the core with the VLBA observations at 15 GHz. Rapid variations of the polarization intensity and angle are found between the epochs in 2002 and 2004. On the kpc-scale, a distant component (labelled as WL) located 11 aresec west (PA=-86 degrees) of the core is detected beyond the core-jet structure which extended to several hundreds of mas in the north-west direction (-50 degrees). A significant emission between the core-jet structure and the WL is revealed. A clump of diffuse emission (labelled EL, 12 arcsec long) at PA 70 degrees to the core, is also detected in the VLA observations, suggesting the presence of double lobes in the source. The core component shows a flat spectrum, while the distant components WL and EL have steep spectra. The steep spectra of the distant components and the detection of the arched emission suggest that the distant components are lobes or hot-spots powered by the core of NRAO 530. The morphologies from pc- to kpc-scales and the bending of jets are investigated. The observed radio morphology from pc to kcp appears to favor the model in which precession or wobbling of the nuclear disk drives the helical motion of the radio plasma and produces the S-shaped structure on kpc scale.

Remarkable changes in the optical properties of CeO2 nanocrystals induced by lanthanide ions doping

Highly uniform and well-dispersed CeO2 and CeO2:Eu3+ (Sm3+, Tb3+) nanocrystals were prepared by a nonhydrolytic solution route and characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectra (XPS), UV/vis absorption, and photoluminescence (PL) spectra, respectively. The result of XRD indicates that the CeO2 nanocrystals are well crystallized with a cubic structure. The TEM images illustrate that the average size of CeO2 nanocrystals is about 3.5 nm in diameter. The absorption spectrum of CeO2:Eu3+ nanocrystals exhibits red-shifting with respect to that of the undoped CeO2 nanocrystals. Under the excitation of 440 nm (or 426 nm) light, the colloidal solution of the undoped CeO2 nanocrystals shows a very weak emission band with a maximum at 501 nm, which is remarkably enhanced by doping additional lanthanide ions (Eu3+, Tb3+, Sm3+) in the CeO2 nanocrystals. The emission band is not due to the characteristic emission of the lanthanide ions but might arise from the oxygen vacancy which is introduced in the fluorite lattice of the CeO2 nanocrystals to compensate the effective negative charge associated with the trivalent ions.

Study on the structure of C-phycocyanin in Spirulina platensis with scanning tunneling microscope

The C-phycocyanin (C-PC) trimmer was isolated from the blue-green alga Spirulina platensis, and scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) was used to investigate its structure, High resolution STM images of C-PC were obtained. From the STM images, it could be observed that the C-PC molecules were disk-like in shape and the subunits of C-PC arranged in ring-like pattern with a channel in the center. After filter treatment, the folding of the polypeptide chains could be. seen clearly. This is the first time to observe directly the topography of phycobiliprotein, and the results showed STM to be a powerful tool for the structural study of phycobiliproteins.

Real-Time Measurement on Deformation Fields of Hole-Excavated Samples under Impact Tension

In this paper, the real-time deformation fields are observed in two different kinds of hole-excavated dog-bone samples loaded by an SHTB, including single hole sample and dual holes sample with the aperture size of 0.8mm. The testing system consists of a high-speed camera, a He-Ne laser, a frame grabber and a synchronization device with the controlling accuracy of I microsecond. Both the single hole expanding process and the interaction of the two holes are recorded with the time interval of 10 mu s. The observed images on the sample surface are analyzed by newly developed software based on digital correlation theory and a modified image processing method. The 2-D displacement fields in plane are obtained with a resolution of 50 mu m and an accuracy of 0.5 mu m. Experimental results obtained in this paper are proofed, by compared with FEM numerical simulations.

Properties of high k gate dielectric gadolinium oxide deposited on Si(100) by dual ion beam deposition (DIBD)

Gadolinium oxide thin films have been prepared on silicon (100) substrates with a low-energy dual ion-beam epitaxial technique. Substrate temperature was an important factor to affect the crystal structures and textures in an ion energy range of 100-500 eV. The films had a monoclinic Gd2O3 structure with preferred orientation ((4) over bar 02) at low substrate temperatures. When the substrate temperature was increased, the orientation turned to (202), and finally, the cubic structure appeared at the substrate temperature of 700 degreesC, which disagreed with the previous report because of the ion energy. The AES studies found that Gadolinium oxide shared Gd2O3 structures, although there were a lot of oxygen deficiencies in the films, and the XPS results confirmed this. AFM was also used to investigate the surface images of the samples. Finally, the electrical properties were presented. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Real-Time Measurement on Deformation Fields of Hole-Excavated Samples under Impact Tension

In this paper, the real-time deformation fields are observed in two different kinds of hole-excavated dog-bone samples loaded by an SHTB, including single hole sample and dual holes sample with the aperture size of 0.8mm. The testing system consists of a high-speed camera, a He-Ne laser, a frame grabber and a synchronization device with the controlling accuracy of I microsecond. Both the single hole expanding process and the interaction of the two holes are recorded with the time interval of 10 mu s. The observed images on the sample surface are analyzed by newly developed software based on digital correlation theory and a modified image processing method. The 2-D displacement fields in plane are obtained with a resolution of 50 mu m and an accuracy of 0.5 mu m. Experimental results obtained in this paper are proofed, by compared with FEM numerical simulations.

Optimized phase pupil masks for extended depths of field

By properly designing a phase pupil mask to modulate or encode the optical images and then digitally restoring them, one can greatly extend the depth of field and improve image quality. The original works done by Dowski and Cathey introduce the use of a cubic phase pupil mask to extend the depth of field. The theoretical and experimental researches all verified its effectiveness. In this paper, we suggest the use of an exponential phase pupil mask to extend the depth of field. This phase mask has two variable parameters for designing to control the shape of the mask so as to modulate the wave-front more flexible. We employ an optimization procedure based on the Fisher information metric to obtain the optimum values of the parameters for the exponential and the cubic masks, respectively. A series of performance comparisons between these two optimized phase masks in extending the depth of field are then done. The results show that the exponential phase mask provide slight advantage to the cubic one in several aspects. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Talbot effect of a high-density grating under femtosecond laser illumination

The Talbot effect of a high-density grating under femtosecond laser illumination is analyzed with rigorous electromagnetic theory which is based on the Fourier decomposition and the rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA). Numerical simulations show that the contrast of the Talbot images steadily decreases as the transmitted femtosecond laser pulses propagate forward and with wider spectrum width of the femtosecond laser pulses. The Talbot images of high-density gratings have much higher sensitivity of the spectrum widths of the incident laser pulses than those of the traditional low-density gratings. In experiments, the spectrums and the pulse widths of the incident pulses are measured with a frequency-resolved optical grating (FROG) apparatus. The Talbot images are detected by using a Talbot scanning near-field optical microscopy (Talbot-SNOM) technique, which are in coincidence with the numerical simulations. This effect should be useful for developing new femtosecond laser techniques and devices. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Algorithm of far-field centre estimation based on phase-only matched filter

Estimation of the far-field centre is carried out in beam auto-alignment. In this paper, the features of the far-field of a square beam are presented. Based on these features, a phase-only matched filter is designed, and the algorithm of centre estimation is developed. Using the simulated images with different kinds of noise and the 40 test images that are taken in sequence, the accuracy of this algorithm is estimated. Results show that the error is no more than one pixel for simulated noise images with a 99% probability, and the stability is restricted within one pixel for test images. Using the improved algorithm, the consumed time is reduced to 0.049 s.

Optical recording properties of metal-azo dye as recording medium with super-resolution near-field structure

A novel metallized azo dye has been synthesized. The absorption spectra of the thin film and thermal characteristic are measured. Static optical recording properties with and without the Bi mask layer super-resolution near-field structure (Super-RENS) of the metal-azo dye are investigated. The results show that the metal-azo dye film has a broad absorbance band in the region of 450-650 nm and the maximum absorbance wavelength is located at 603 nm. It is also found that the new metallized azo dye occupies excellent thermal stability, initiatory decomposition temperature is at 270 degrees C and the mass loss is about 48% in a narrow temperature region (15 degrees C). The complex refractive index N (N = n + ik) is measured. High refractive index (n = 2.45) and low extinction coefficient (k = 0.2) at the recording wavelength 650nm are attained. Static optical recording tests with and without Super-RENS are carried out using a 650nm semiconductor diode laser with recording power of 7mW and laser pulse duration of 200ns. The AFM images show that the diameter of recording mark on the dye film with the Bi mask layer is reduced about 42%, compared to that of recorded mark on the dye film without Super-RENS. It is indicated that Bi can well performed as a mask layer of the dye recording layer and the metallized azo dye can be a promising candidate for recording media with the super-resolution near-field structure.