Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Creation Of An Ultracold Neutral Plasma, Scott D. Bergeson, T. C. Killian, S. Kulin, L. A. Orozco, C. Orzel, S. L. Rolston

Faculty Publications

We report the creation of an ultracold neutral plasma by photoionization of laser-cooled xenon atoms. The charge carrier density is as high as 2×10^9 cm^-3, and the temperatures of electrons and ions are as low as 100 mK and 10 uK, respectively. Plasma behavior is evident in the trapping of electrons by the positive ion cloud when the Debye screening length becomes smaller than the size of the sample. We produce plasmas with parameters such that both electrons and ions are strongly coupled.

Salinity History Of Coastal Marshes Reconstructed From Diatom Remains, Michael L. Parsons, Quay Dortch, R. Eugene Turner, Nancy N. Rabalais

Faculty Publications

Sediment cores were collected from three Louisiana coastal marsh ponds, dated with radioisotopes, and analyzed for diatom remains to determine if long-term salinity changes were evident in the sediment record. A diatom-based salinity index formulated from a statistical comparison of available salinity data and changing diatom assemblages demonstrated that diatom remains appear to preserve salinity signals in coastal brackish and salt marsh environments. The salinity index was applied to sediment cores spanning the late 1600s to the 1990s and provided a more complete record of salinity than field data, which were temporally and spatially incomplete. The salinity reconstructions indicated that …

Dual Function Euv Multilayer Mirrors For The Image Mission, David D. Allred, R. Steven Turley, Matthew B. Squires

Faculty Publications

We have developed a new family of EUV multilayer mirror coatings using uranium. Using this approach we have coated a set of six mirrors for the EUV Imager, a component of the IMAGE mission. This mission is a Medium Explorer (MIDEX) program, which is scheduled for launch early in 2000. The EUV Imager will study the distribution of He+ in the Earth's plasmasphere by detecting its resonantly scattered emission at 30.4 nm (41 eV) and will produce images of the structure and dynamics of the cold plasma on a global scale. There is, however, a bright at 58.4 nm (21 …

Selective Excitation And Thermal Quenching Of The Yellow Luminescence Of Gan, John S. Colton, P. Y. Yu, K. L. Teo, E. R. Weber, P. Perlin, I. Grzegory, K. Uchida

Faculty Publications

We report the observation of narrower structures in the yellow luminescence of bulk and thin-film n-type GaN, using the technique of selective excitation. These fine structures exhibit thermal quenching associated with an activated behavior. We attribute these fine structures to phonons and electronic excitations of a shallow donor-deep acceptor complex, and determine its activation energy for delocalization. Our results suggest that in addition to distant donor-acceptor pairs, the yellow luminescence can also involve emission complexes of shallow donors and deep acceptors.

Intersecting Chains In Finite Vector Spaces, Eva Czabarka

Faculty Publications

We prove an Erdős–Ko–Rado-type theorem for intersecting k-chains of subspaces of a finite vector space. This is the q-generalization of earlier results of Erdős, Seress and Székely for intersecting k-chains of subsets of an underlying set. The proof hinges on the author's proper generalization of the shift technique from extremal set theory to finite vector spaces, which uses a linear map to define the generalized shift operation. The theorem is the following.

For c = 0, 1, consider k-chains of subspaces of an n-dimensional vector space over GF(q), such that the smallest subspace in any chain has dimension at least …

Phonon And Elastic Instabilities In Moc And Mon, Gus L. W. Hart, Barry M. Klein

Faculty Publications

We present several results related to the instability of MoC and MoN in the B1 (sodium chloride) structure. These compounds were proposed as potential superconductors with moderately high transition temperatures. We show that the elastic instability in B1-structure MoN, demonstrated several years ago, persists at elevated pressures, thus offering little hope of stabilizing this material without chemical doping. For MoC, another material for which stoichiometric fabrication in the B1 structure has not proven possible, we find that all of the cubic elastic constants are positive, indicating elastic stability. Instead, we find X-point phonon instabilities in MoC (and in MoN as …

Pretransitional Behavior Above The Nematic-Isotropic Phase Transition Of An Auxetic Trimer Liquid Crystal, Daeseung Kang, Milind P. Mahajan, Shiyong Zhang, Rolfe G. Petschek, Charles Rosenblatt, Chaobin He, Puwei Lu, A.C. Griffin

Faculty Publications

Static Light scattering and electric field-induced Kerr measurements were performed above the nematic-isotropic phase transition of a terminal-lateral-lateral-terminal negative Poisson ratio trimer. Far both measurements the inverse susceptibility was observed to be nearly linear with temperature, a result inconsistent with our previously reported Kerr data [Phys. Rev. E 58, 2041 (1998)]. [S1063-651X(99)11010-9].

Collisional Dynamics Of Bi2 A(0U+). I. Quantum-Resolved Vibrational Energy Transfer For V′=0–4, Robert E. Franklin, Glen P. Perram

Faculty Publications

Vibrational-to-translational energy transfer between the lowest vibrational levels (v′=0–4) of the A(0⁺_u) state of Bi₂ has been investigated using spectrally resolved, laser-induced fluorescence techniques. The small vibrational spacing (ω′e≃132 cm⁻¹) leads to highly nonadiabatic conditions, particularly for the Bi₂(A)–He collision pair. However, the Δv=−1 transition probabilities for collisions with the rare gases range from 0.75% to 1.75% per collision, considerably lower than would be anticipated from standard vibrational energy transfer theory. Multiquantum (Δv′=±2) transfer rates are low, consistent with the low anharmonicity of the A(0⁺_u) state. The rates for …

Mathematical Modelling Of Extracellular Matrix Dynamics Using Discrete Cells: Fiber Orientation And Tissue Regeneration, J. C. Dallon, J. A. Sherratt, P. K. Maini

Faculty Publications

Matrix orientation plays a crucial role in determining the severity of scar tissue after dermal wounding. We present a model framework which allows us to examine the interaction of many of the factors involved in orientation and alignment. Within this framework, cells are considered as discrete objects, while the matrix is modeled as a continuum. Using numerical simulations, we investigate the effect on alignment of changing cell properties and of varying cell interactions with collagen and fibrin.

Polymerization-Induced Phase Separation, J.C. Lee

Faculty Publications

A molecular dynamics simulation is performed to study the kinetics of microphase separation in a polymer-dispersed-liquid-crystal forming process. An equimolar mixture of monomers and liquid crystal molecules are thermalized in a well mixed state. The monomers are then polymerized at the same temperature. The end product is a spanning gel with liquid crystal molecules aggregating in droplets here and there. The peak position of the equal-time structure function suggests that the growth of the droplets may be described with t^-0.23. The small growth exponent is just one of several features which may be attributed to the growing elastic …

An Ellam Scheme For Advection-Diffusion Equations In Two Dimensions, Hong Wang, Helge K. Dahle, Richard E. Ewing, Magne S. Espedal, Robert Sharpley, Shushuang Man

Faculty Publications

We develop an Eulerian--Lagrangian localized adjoint method (ELLAM) to solve two-dimensional advection-diffusion equations with all combinations of inflow and outflow Dirichlet, Neumann, and flux boundary conditions. The ELLAM formalism provides a systematic framework for implementation of general boundary conditions, leading to mass-conservative numerical schemes. The computational advantages of the ELLAM approximation have been demonstrated for a number of one-dimensional transport systems; practical implementations of ELLAM schemes in multiple spatial dimensions that require careful algorithm development are discussed in detail in this paper. Extensive numerical results are presented to compare the ELLAM scheme with many widely used numerical methods and to …

The Little Neuron That Could, Timothy L. Andersen, Tony R. Martinez

Faculty Publications

SLPs (single layer perceptrons) oflen exhibit reasonable generalization performance on many problems of interest. However, due to the well known limitations of SLPs very little effort has been made to improve their performance. This paper proposes a method for improving the performance of SLPs called "wagging" (weight averaging). This method involves training several different SLPs on the same training data, and then averaging their weights to obtain a single SLP. The performance of the wagged SLP is compared with other more complex learning algorithms (bp, c4.5, ibl, MML, etc) on 15 data sets from real world problem domains. Surprisingly, the …

The Robustness Of Relaxation Rates In Constraint Satisfaction Networks, Tony R. Martinez, Dan A. Ventura, D. Randall Wilson, Brian Moncur

Faculty Publications

Constraint satisfaction networks contain nodes that receive weighted evidence from external sources and/or other nodes. A relaxation process allows the activation of nodes to affect neighboring nodes, which in turn can affect their neighbors, allowing information to travel through a network. When doing discrete updates (as in a software implementation of a relaxation network), a goal net or goal activation can be computed in response to the net input into a node, and a relaxation rate can then be used to determine how fast the node moves from its current value to its goal value. An open question was whether …

Combining Cross-Validation And Confidence To Measure Fitness, Tony R. Martinez, D. Randall Wilson

Faculty Publications

Neural network and machine learning algorithms often have parameters that must be tuned for good performance on a particular task. Leave-one-out cross-validation (LCV) accuracy is often used to measure the fitness of a set of parameter values. However, small changes in parameters often have no effect on LCV accuracy. Many learning algorithms can measure the confidence of a classification decision, but often confidence alone is an inappropriate measure of fitness. This paper proposes a combined measure of Cross- Validation and Confidence (CVC) for obtaining a continuous measure of fitness for sets of parameters in learning algorithms. This paper also proposes …

Extending The Power And Capacity Of Constraint Satisfaction Networks, Tony R. Martinez, Xinchuan Zeng

Faculty Publications

This work focuses on improving the Hopfield network for solving optimization problems. Although much work has been done in this area, the performance of the Hopfield network is still not satisfactory in terms of valid convergence and quality of solutions. We address this issue in this work by combing a new activation function (EBA) and a new relaxation procedure (CR) in order to improve the performance of the Hopfield network. Each of EBA and CR has been individually demonstrated capable of substantially improving the performance. The combined approach has been evaluated through 20,000 simulations based on 200 randomly generated city …

Cross Validation And Mlp Architecture Selection, Timothy L. Andersen, Tony R. Martinez

Faculty Publications

The performance of cross validation (CV) based MLP architecture selection is examined using 14 real world problem domains. When testing many different network architectures the results show that CV is only slightly more likely than random to select the optimal network architecture, and that the strategy of using the simplest available network architecture performs better than CV in this case. Experimental evidence suggests several reasons for the poor performance of CV. In addition, three general strategies which lead to significant increase in the performance of CV are proposed. While this paper focuses on using CV to select the optimal MLP …

A Neural Model Of Centered Tri-Gram Speech Recognition, Tony R. Martinez, Dan A. Ventura, D. Randall Wilson, Brian Moncur

Faculty Publications

A relaxation network model that includes higher order weight connections is introduced. To demonstrate its utility, the model is applied to the speech recognition domain. Traditional speech recognition systems typically consider only that context preceding the word to be recognized. However, intuition suggests that considering both preceding context as well as following context should improve recognition accuracy. The work described here tests this hypothesis by applying the higher order relaxation network to consider both precedes and follows context in speech recognition. The results demonstrate both the general utility of the higher order relaxation network as well as its improvement over …

The Impact Of Accelerating Land-Use Change On The N-Cycle Of Tropical Aquatic Ecosystems: Current Conditions And Projected Changes, J. A. Downing, M. Mcclain, R. Twilley, J. M. Melack, J. Elser, Nancy N. Rabalais, W. M. Lewis Jr., R. Eugene Turner, J. Corredor, D. Soto, A. Yanez Arancibia, J. A. Kopaska, R. W. Howarth

Faculty Publications

Published data and analyses from temperate and tropical aquatic systems are used to summarize knowledge about the potential impact of land-use alteration on the nitrogen biogeochemistry of tropical aquatic ecosystems, identify important patterns and recommend key needs for research. The tropical N-cycle is traced from pre-disturbance conditions through the phases of disturbance, highlighting major differences between tropical and temperate systems that might influence development strategies in the tropics. Analyses suggest that tropical freshwaters are more frequently N-limited than temperate zones, while tropical marine systems may show more frequent P limitation. These analyses indicate that disturbances to pristine tropical lands will …

A Comparison Of Eclectic Learning And Stagger, J. Cory Barker, Jargalsaihan Batsaihan

Faculty Publications

This project compares two machine-learning methods, Stagger and Eclectic on their classification correctness. Both systems were tested with real-world data sets previously used and tested in other machine learning and statistical literature. The Eclectic System performed better than Stagger on every data set.

Overview: Nonlinear Dynamics Related To Polymeric Systems, Irving R. Epstein, John A. Pojman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Period-Doubling Behavior In Frontal Polymerization Of Multifunctional Acrylates, Jonathan Masere, Felicia Stewart, Timothy Meehan, John A. Pojman

Faculty Publications

Front dynamics in the frontal polymerization of two multifunctional acrylate monomers, 1,6-hexanediol diacrylate (HDDA) and trimethylolpropane ethoxylate triacrylate (TMPTA), with Lupersol 231 [1,1-di(t-butylperoxy)-3,3,5-trimethylcyclohexane] as the initiator, are studied. In most frontal polymerization systems, the dynamics are associated with a planar front propagating through the sample. However, in some cases, front behavior can be altered: the front becomes nonplanar characterized by complex patterns like spin modes and pulsations. To determine how these periodic and aperiodic modes arise, reactant solutions consisting of HDDA diluted with diethyl phthalate (DEP) and TMPTA diluted with dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) were used in the study. …

Toboggan-Based Intelligent Scissors With A Four-Parameter Edge Model, William A. Barrett, Eric N. Mortensen

Faculty Publications

Intelligent Scissors is an interactive image segmentation tool that allows a user to select piece-wise globally optimal contour segments that correspond to a desired object boundary. We present a new and faster method of computing the optimal path by over-segmenting the image using tobogganing and then imposing a weighted planar graph on top of the resulting region boundaries. The resulting region-based graph is many times smaller than the previous pixel-based graph, thus providing faster graph searches and immediate user interaction. Further, tobogganing provides an new systematic and predictable framework for computing edge model parameters, allowing subpixel localization as well as …

Multiscale Image Registration Using Scale Trace Correlation, Bruce B. Hansen, Bryan S. Morse

Faculty Publications

This paper presents a method for registering images at different magnifications (scales) by treating the problem not only as one of scaling the image coordinates but also as one inherently involving multiresolution information. While some existing methods for multiresolution registration do consider the way the resolution (scale) affects the image, they often consider the image one scale at a time, using geometric properties within that scale. Others use multiscale information, usually to produce more robust results, but only to register same-magnification images (e.g., stereo). A scale trace is the set of values that a single pixel takes on as magnification …

Model Predictive Satisficing Fuzzy Logic Control, Richard L. Frost, Michael A. Goodrich, Wynn C. Stirling

Faculty Publications

Model-predictive control, which is an alternative to conventional optimal control, provides controller solutions to many constrained and nonlinear control problems. However, even when a good model is available, it may be necessary for an expert to specify the relationship between local model predictions and global system performance. We present a satisficing fuzzy logic controller that is based on a receding control horizon, but which employs a fuzzy description of system consequences via model predictions. This controller considers the gains and losses associated with each control action, is compatible with robust design objectives, and permits flexible defuzzifier design. We demonstrate the …

Dynamics Of Formation Of Soliton Conductivity In A 2 D-Array Of Linear Chains Containing Commensurate Charge Density Waves Near The Contact With A Normal Metal, Yuriy V. Pershin Dr, Alexander S. Rozhavsky

Faculty Publications

We make a numerical study of the conversion of conduction electrons into charge density wave (CDW) topological solitons at the interface between a normal metal and a 2D-array of the CDW-carrying linear chains. The interplay of commensurability potential, interchain interaction, and electric field on the dynamics of soliton formation is studied. When the interchain interaction exceeds the commensurability energy, the dynamic mechanism of creation of fractionally charged solitons near the contact is suppressed and specific contact nonlinearity in transport current is not observed.

Metallicity Calibration Of A Ddo Cn Index And Other Low-Resolution Indices For G And K Stars, B. J. Taylor

Faculty Publications

Metallicity calibrations of low-resolution parameters are potentially useful for (at least) two problems: the properties of moving groups, and the supermetallicity problem in K giants. In this paper, metallicity calibrations are derived for six sets of parameters. One of these parameters is the DDO CN index deltaCN. This parameter and three others are calibrated for use with evolved G and K stars. Two additional sets of low-resolution parameters are calibrated for use with G and K dwarfs. The calibrations are derived by comparing the input data with two catalogs of homogenized high-dispersion results from diverse authors (see Taylor 1995, 1999a). …

The Mean Spherical Approximation For A Dipolar Yukawa Fluid, Douglas Henderson, Dezso Boda, Istvan Szalai, Kwong-Yu Chan

Faculty Publications

The dipolar hard sphere fluid (DHSF) is a useful model of a polar fluid. However, the DHSF lacks a vapor–liquid transition due to the formation of chain-like structures. Such chains are not characteristic of real polar fluids. A more realistic model of a polar fluid is obtained by adding a Lennard–Jones potential to the intermolecular potential. Very similar results are obtained by adding a Yukawa potential, instead of the Lennard–Jones potential. We call this fluid the dipolar Yukawa fluid (DYF). We show that an analytical solution of the mean spherical approximation (MSA) can be obtained for the DYF. Thus, the …

Characterization Of Hypoxia: Topic 1 Report For The Integrated Assessment On Hypoxia In The Gulf Of Mexico, Nancy N. Rabalais, R. Eugene Turner, Dubravko Justic, Quay Dortch, William J. Wiseman

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Modes And Quasi-Modes For M = 1,2 In A Gyrokinetic Model For A Non-Neutral Plasma, S. Neil Rasband, Ross L. Spencer

Faculty Publications

Modes and quasi-modes for m = 1,2 are studied in a gyro-kinetic model for a pure-electron plasma. Only z-independent perturbations are considered. Numerical methods are used to solve the relevant differential equations for smooth, analytic density profiles. Different temperatures and representative profiles are considered and comparison is made with the familiar cold fluid model from which the results depart but little, except at higher temperatures. A continuum component to the spectrum, present in the cold-fluid model, remains in the gyro-kinetic model to the order considered.

Nutrient Enhanced Coastal Ocean Productivity In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico, William J. Wiseman Jr., Michael J. Dagg, Nancy N. Rabalais, Terry E. Whitledge

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.