Detailed comparison of injection-seeded and self-seeded performance of a 1060nm gain-switched Fabry-Perot laser diode

We investigate and compare the performance of a gain-switched picosecond Fabry-Perot laser diode operated at 1.06 µm under both injection- and self-seeded conditions. Our experiments show that comparable performance can be obtained for both modes of operation, with the self-seeding arrangement offering overall benefits in terms of reduced system complexity and cost, providing the associated quantization of available pulse repetition rate can be tolerated

Localization and Interaction Effects in Strongly Underdoped La2-xSrxCuO4

The in-plane magnetoresistance (MR) in La2-xSrxCuO4 films with 0.03 < x < 0.05 has been studied in the temperature range 1.6 K to 100 K, and in magnetic fields up to 14 T, parallel and perpendicular to the CuO2 planes. The behavior of the MR is consistent with a predominant influence of interaction effects at high temperatures, switching gradually to a regime dominated by spin scattering at low T. Weak localization effects are absent. A positive orbital MR appears close to the boundary between the antiferromagnetic and the spin-glass phase, suggesting the onset of Maki-Thompson superconducting fluctuations deep inside the insulating phase.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Phys. Rev. Letter

Editorial

We use a linear FROG technique based on electro-optic modulation to fully characterise for the first time pulses from a 1.06 µm FP laser diode and design a grating to provide optimum pulse compression

Room temperature spin relaxation in GaAs/AlGaAs multiple quantum wells

We have explored the dependence of electron spin relaxation in undoped GaAs/AlGaAs quantum wells on well width (confinement energy) at 300 K. For wide wells, the relaxation rate tends to the intrinsic bulk value due to the D'yakonov-Perel (DP) mechanism with momentum scattering by phonons. In narrower wells, there is a strong dependence of relaxation rate on well width, as expected for the DP mechanism, but also considerable variation between samples from different sources, which we attribute to differences in sample interface morphology. (C) 1998 American Institute of Physics. [S0003-6951(98)02541-8].</p

Learning Visual Question Answering by Bootstrapping Hard Attention

Attention mechanisms in biological perception are thought to select subsets of perceptual information for more sophisticated processing which would be prohibitive to perform on all sensory inputs. In computer vision, however, there has been relatively little exploration of hard attention, where some information is selectively ignored, in spite of the success of soft attention, where information is re-weighted and aggregated, but never filtered out. Here, we introduce a new approach for hard attention and find it achieves very competitive performance on a recently-released visual question answering datasets, equalling and in some cases surpassing similar soft attention architectures while entirely ignoring some features. Even though the hard attention mechanism is thought to be non-differentiable, we found that the feature magnitudes correlate with semantic relevance, and provide a useful signal for our mechanism's attentional selection criterion. Because hard attention selects important features of the input information, it can also be more efficient than analogous soft attention mechanisms. This is especially important for recent approaches that use non-local pairwise operations, whereby computational and memory costs are quadratic in the size of the set of features.Comment: ECCV 201

Strategies in crowd and crowd structure

In an emergency situation, imitation of strategies of neighbours can lead to an order-disorder phase transition, where spatial clusters of pedestrians adopt the same strategy. We assume that there are two strategies, cooperating and competitive, which correspond to a smaller or larger desired velocity. The results of our simulations within the Social Force Model indicate that the ordered phase can be detected as an increase of spatial order of positions of the pedestrians in the crowd.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure

Cost effective flat plate photovoltaic modules using light trapping

Work in optical trapping in 'thick films' is described to form a design guide for photovoltaic engineers. A thick optical film can trap light by diffusive reflection and total internal reflection. Light can be propagated reasonably long distances compared with layer thicknesses by this technique. This makes it possible to conduct light from inter-cell and intra-cell areas now not used in photovoltaic modules onto active cell areas