GPS observations in Costa Rica from 1994-1997 reveal a complex pattern of motion consistent with the superposition of seismic cycle and secular plate margin deformation. In the south, velocity vectors are consistent with motion of the Panama Block plus postseismic deformation following the 1991 Limon earthquake, and interseismic strain due to partial locking of the Middle America Trench (MAT) t...

PURPOSE To validate the feasibility of using a newly designed MR imaging-guidewire (MRIG) to guide angioplasty balloon placement in coronary arteries. MATERIALS AND METHODS A custom gold/sliver/Nitinol/MP35N-based, 0.014-inch MRIG was manufactured. To test its mechanical performance we used the new MRIG to catheterize the left coronary arteries of three dogs under x-ray fluoroscopy. To furthe...

Motivated by a recently observed unusual magnetoresistance in sliver chalcogenides, we propose a mechanism for large magnetoresistance in nonmagnetic materials. We show that the Zeeman splitting can play a very important role in MR under certain conditions. In general, the electron density of states can be divided into two parts, one for spin-up electrons and the other for spindown. The two par...

A high-temperature pressure sensor realized by the post-fire metallization on zirconia ceramic is presented. The pressure signal can be read out wirelessly through the magnetic coupling between the reader antenna and the sensor due to that the sensor is equivalent to an inductive-capacitive (LC) resonance circuit which has a pressure-sensitive resonance frequency. Considering the excellent mech...

Boundary representation models reconstructed from 3D range data suffer from various inaccuracies caused by noise in the data and by numerical errors in the model building software. The quality of such models can be improved in a beautification step, where geometric regularities need to be detected and imposed on the model, and defects requiring topological change need to be corrected. This pape...

In vacuum string field theory, the sliver state solution has been proposed as a candidate of a D-brane configuration. Physical observables associated with this solution, such as its energy density and the tachyon mass, are written in terms of the Neumann coefficients. These observables, though vanish naively due to twist symmetry, acquire non-vanishing values arising from their singular behavio...

The spectrum of the infinite dimensional Neumann matrices M, M and M in the oscillator construction of the three-string vertex determines key properties of the star product and of wedge and sliver states. We study the spectrum of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of these matrices using the derivation K1 = L1 + L−1 of the star algebra, which defines a simple infinite matrix commuting with the Neuman...