The exceptional actuation properties of liquid crystal elastomers (LCEs) have made these materials highly attractive for various emerging applications such as soft robotics and artificial muscles. large strain gradients occurring under thermal stimuli induce bending curling initially flat LCE films. Due to the complex physics behind spontaneous deformation in nematic elastomers, there is no sin...

A conceptual design is presented for a high power pion production target for neutrino factories and muon colliders that is based on a rotating metal band of either inconel alloy 718, titanium alloy 6Al-4V grade 5 or nickel. The band is 5 meters in diameter and is tangentially intercepted by a pulsed proton beam inside a 20 Tesla tapered solenoidal magnetic pion capture channel. The mechanical l...

A method for designing near optimal, tapered subarrays for adaptive interference cancellation is proposed. The design method simultaneously produces a complete ordered set of fixed beam definitions, or nonadaptive weight vectors. The designer may choose to implement the first of these if he or she wishes to have exactly adaptive weights. In other words, the digital–adaptive processing is done i...

We report modeling, fabrication, and characterization of tapered waveguides, using periodically segmented annealed proton exchange in LiNbO(3). For a taper transforming the 1/e full width (intensity) mode size from 6.0 microm x 4.4 microm to 2.0 microm x 1.3 microm, 0.4-dB excess loss was observed. The large, slightly elliptical mode can ease coupling to single-mode fibers and circular free-spa...

Polycapillary x-ray optics provide an innovative new way to control x-ray beams. Placing these optics after the object to be imaged provides very efficient rejection of Compton scatter, while allowing image magnification without loss of resolution, image demagnification, or image shaping to match with digital detectors. An extensive study of the effects of surface and profile defects have great...

Phase retrieval is a powerful numerical method that can be used to determine the wavefront of laser beams based only on intensity measurements, without the use of expensive, low-resolution specialized wavefront sensors such as Shack-Hartmann sensors. However, phase retrieval techniques generally suffer from poor convergence and fidelity when the input measurements contain electronic or optical ...

Four-wave mixing can be used to generate coherent output beams, with frequencies difficult to acquire in commercial lasers. Here, a single narrow external cavity diode laser locked to the two photon 5s-5d transition in rubidium is combined with a tapered amplifier system to produce a high power cw beam at 778 nm and used to generate coherent light at 420 nm through parametric four-wave mixing. ...

In the last years, glass/epoxy laminated composites which are a combination of glass reinforcement and epoxy matrix widely used in field automotive aerospace due to their strength/weight ratio. The proposed study statistically evaluates natural frequency data obtained by numerical analysis reinforced beams with Taguchi method. Accordingly, analyzes were performed based on L27 orthogonal array a...