Design of a variable stiffness soft dexterous gripper

This article presents the design of a variable stiffness, soft, three fingered dexterous gripper. The gripper uses two designs of McKibben muscles. Extensor muscles which increase in length when pressurised are used to form the fingers of the gripper. Contractor muscles which decrease in length when pressurised are then used to apply forces to the fingers via tendons which cause flexion and extension of the fingers. The two types of muscles are arranged to act antagonistically and this means that by raising the pressure in all of the pneumatic muscles the stiffness of the system can be increased without a resulting change in finger position. The article presents the design of the gripper, some basic kinematics to describe its function and then experimental results demonstrating the ability to adjust the bending stiffness of the gripper’s fingers. It has been demonstrated that the finger’s bending stiffness can be increased by over 150%. The article concludes by demonstrating that the fingers can be closed loop position controlled and are able to track step and sinusoidal inputs

Acquired factor V inhibitor in a context of sepsis and disseminated intravascular coagulation

International audienc

Eikonal analysis of Coulomb distortion in quasi-elastic electron scattering

An eikonal expansion is used to provide systematic corrections to the eikonal approximation through order $1/k^2$, where $k$ is the wave number. Electron wave functions are obtained for the Dirac equation with a Coulomb potential. They are used to investigate distorted-wave matrix elements for quasi-elastic electron scattering from a nucleus. A form of effective-momentum approximation is obtained using trajectory-dependent eikonal phases and focusing factors. Fixing the Coulomb distortion effects at the center of the nucleus, the often-used ema approximation is recovered. Comparisons of these approximations are made with full calculations using the electron eikonal wave functions. The ema results are found to agree well with the full calculations.Comment: 12 pages, 6 Postscript figure

Transversity and Transverse Spin in Nucleon Structure through SIDIS at Jefferson Lab

The JLab 12 GeV upgrade with a proposed solenoid detector and the CLAS12 detector can provide the granularity and three-dimensional kinematic coverage in longitudinal and transverse momentum, $0.1\le x \le 0.5$, $0.3 \le z \le 0.7$ with $P_T \le 1.5 {\rm GeV}$ to precisely measure the leading twist chiral-odd and $T$-odd quark distribution and fragmentation functions in SIDIS. The large $x$ experimental reach of these detectors with a 12 GeV CEBAF at JLab makes it {\em ideal} to obtain precise data on the {\em valence-dominated} transversity distribution function and to access the tensor charge.Comment: 7 Pages, 2 figures. Summary of the working group on Transversity and Transverse Spin Physics, from the workshop, "Inclusive and Semi-Inclusive Spin Physics with High Luminosity and LargeAcceptance at 11 GeV", Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility (JLAB), December 13-14, 2006, Jefferson Lab, Newport News, VA USA. Serves as input for the Nuclear Physics Long Range Plan on QCD and Hadron Physic

Functional approach to the electromagnetic response function: the Longitudinal Channel

In this paper we address the (charge) longitudinal electromagnetic response for a homogeneous system of nucleons interacting via meson exchanges in the functional framework. This approach warrants consistency if the calculation is carried on order-by-order in the mesonic loop expansion with RPA-dressed mesonic propagators. At the 1-loop order and considering pion, rho and omega exchanges we obtain a quenching of the response, in line with the experimental results.Comment: RevTeX, 18 figures available upon request - to be published in Physical Review

Quasielastic 12C(e,e'p) Reaction at High Momentum Transfer

We measured the 12C(e,e'p) cross section as a function of missing energy in parallel kinematics for (q,w) = (970 MeV/c, 330 MeV) and (990 MeV/c, 475 MeV). At w=475 MeV, at the maximum of the quasielastic peak, there is a large continuum (E_m > 50 MeV) cross section extending out to the deepest missing energy measured, amounting to almost 50% of the measured cross section. The ratio of data to DWIA calculation is 0.4 for both the p- and s-shells. At w=330 MeV, well below the maximum of the quasielastic peak, the continuum cross section is much smaller and the ratio of data to DWIA calculation is 0.85 for the p-shell and 1.0 for the s-shell. We infer that one or more mechanisms that increase with $\omega$ transform some of the single-nucleon-knockout into multinucleon knockout, decreasing the valence knockout cross section and increasing the continuum cross section.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, Revtex (multicol, prc and aps styles), to appear in Phys Rev

The Role of Final State Interactions in Quasielastic 56^{56}Fe(e,e′)(e,e') Reactions at large ∣q⃗∣|\vec q|

A relativistic finite nucleus calculation using a Dirac optical potential is used to investigate the importance of final state interactions [FSI] at large momentum transfers in inclusive quasielastic electronuclear reactions. The optical potential is derived from first-order multiple scattering theory and then is used to calculate the FSI in a nonspectral Green's function doorway approach. At intermediate momentum transfers excellent predictions of the quasielastic $^{56}$Fe$(e,e')$ experimental data for the longitudinal response function are obtained. In comparisons with recent measurements at $|{\vec q|}=1.14$~GeV/c the theoretical calculations of $R_L$ give good agreement for the quasielastic peak shape and amplitude, but place the position of the peak at an energy transfer of about $40$~MeV higher than the data.Comment: 13 pages typeset using revtex 3.0 with 6 postscript figures in accompanying uuencoded file; submitted to Phys. Rev.

Causality in relativistic many body theory

The stability of the nuclear matter system with respect to density fluctuations is examined exploring in detail the pole structure of the electro-nuclear response functions. Making extensive use of the method of dispersion integrals we calculate the full polarization propagator not only for real energies in the spacelike and timelike regime but also in the whole complex energy plane. The latter proved to be necessary in order to identify unphysical causality violating poles which are the consequence of a neglection of vacuum polarization. On the contrary it is shown that Dirac sea effects stabilize the nuclear matter system shifting the unphysical pole from the upper energy plane back to the real axis. The exchange of strength between these real timelike collective excitations and the spacelike energy regime is shown to lead to a reduction of the quasielastic peak as it is seen in electron scattering experiments. Neglecting vacuum polarization one also obtains a reduction of the quasielastic peak but in this case the strength is partly shifted to the causality violating pole mentioned above which consequently cannot be considered as a physical reliable result. Our investigation of the response function in the energy region above the threshold of nucleon anti-nucleon production leads to another remarkable result. Treating the nucleons as point-like Dirac particles we show that for any isospin independent NN-interaction RPA-correlations provide a reduction of the production amplitude for $p\bar p$-pairs by a factor 2.Comment: 19 pages Latex including 12 postscript figure