• Fusion is the process whereby two light nuclei bind to form a heavier nucleus with the release of energy • Harnessing fusion on Earth via deuterium and tritium reactions would lead to an environmentally friendly and almost limitless energy source • One promising route to fusion power is to magnetically confine a hot, dense plasma inside a doughnut-shaped device called a tokamak • The JET toka...

A theoretical procedure has been developed for the determination of internal and external electromagnetic fields that result from the interaction of a higher-order Gaussian beam with a homogeneous sphere. Specific calculations are performed for (1, 0), (0, 1), and (1, 1) mode Hermite-Gaussian beams and for doughnut mode beams of four different polarizations (radial, angular, arced, and helix). ...

This chapter contains excerpts from “Seismic tomography, adjoint methods, time reversal, and banana-doughnut kernels,” by Jeroen Tromp, Carl Tape, and Qinya Liu. My primary contribution to this study was to adapt a 2D SEM wave propagation code to construct finitefrequency kernels. In a series of numerical experiements, I illustrated the formation of finitefrequency sensitivity kernels via the i...

This study projects how much Medicare beneficiaries who sign up for the standard Part D drug benefit in 2006 will pay in quarterly out-of-pocket payments through 2008. In the first year we estimate that about 38 percent of enrollees will hit the benefit's no-coverage zone, known as the "doughnut hole," and that 14 percent will exceed the catastrophic threshold. Because drug spending is highly p...

We extend the subtractive imaging method to label-free second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy to enhance the spatial resolution and contrast. This method is based on the intensity difference between two images obtained with circularly polarized Gaussian and doughnut-shaped beams, respectively. By characterizing the intensity and polarization distributions of the two focused beams, we verif...