Silicon slow-light-based photonic mixer for microwave-frequencyconversion applications

This paper was published in OPTICS LETTERS and is made available as an electronic reprint with the permission of OSA. The paper can be found at the following URL on the OSA website: http://dx.doi.org/10.1364/OL.37.001721. Systematic or multiple reproduction or distribution to multiple locations via electronic or other means is prohibited and is subject to penalties under law[EN] We describe and demonstrate experimentally a method for photonic mixing of microwave signals by using a silicon electro-optical Mach¿Zehnder modulator enhanced via slow-light propagation. Slow light with a group index of ~11, achieved in a one-dimensional periodic structure, is exploited to improve the upconversion performance of an input frequency signal from 1 to 10.25 GHz. A minimum transmission point is used to successfully demonstrate the upconversion with very low conversion losses of ~7¿¿dB and excellent quality of the received I/Q modulated QPSK signal with an optimum EVM of ~8%.Financial support from FP7-224312 HELIOS project and Generalitat Valenciana under PROMETEO-2010-087 R&D Excellency Program (NANOMET) are acknowledged. F. Y.Gardes, D. J. Thomson, and G. T. Reed are supported by funding received from the UK EPSRC funding body under the grant “UK Silicon Photonics.” The author A. M. Gutiérrez thanks D. Marpaung for his useful help.Gutiérrez Campo, AM.; Brimont, ACJ.; Herrera Llorente, J.; Aamer, M.; Martí Sendra, J.; Thomson, DJ.; Gardes, FY.... (2012). Silicon slow-light-based photonic mixer for microwave-frequencyconversion applications. Optics Letters. 37(10):1721-1723. https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.37.001721S17211723371

Un modello 2D con porosit\ue0 per lo studio di allagamenti a larga scala in aree urbane

-Modello 2D con porosit\ue0 per lo studio a larga scala di allagamenti in aree urbane. -Introdotta una formulazione della porosit\ue0 di flusso anisotropa che evita la dipendenza dalla griglia. -Il modello \ue8 in grado di riprodurre la soluzione di riferimento sulla base di soli parametri geometrici. -L\u2019applicazione a casi studio con batimetrie reali \ue8 in fase di sviluppo

Non-linear wave generation and absorption using open boundaries within DualSPHysics

The present work introduces the implementation of wave generation and wave absorption of non-linear, long-crested regular and irregular waves in the WCSPH-based (Weakly Compressible Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics) DualSPHysics solver. Open boundaries are applied here for both wave generation and absorption. These boundaries consist of buffer zones, on which physical quantities are imposed, or extrapolated from the fluid domain using ghost nodes. Several layers of buffer particles are used to create an inlet and an outlet, where the horizontal component of the orbital velocities, surface elevation and pressure can be imposed from any external source or extrapolated from the fluid domain. This allows the creation of a numerical wave flume with a length of one wavelength. Reflections within the fluid domain are successfully mitigated using a velocity correction term at both inlet and outlet. The implementation is validated with theoretical solutions, in terms of water surface elevation, wave orbital velocities, and dynamic pressure. The model proves to be capable of propagating waves with less than 5% reflection, and RMSE errors on physical quantities lower than 4.3%. The application of open boundaries proves to be an accurate method to generate and absorb non-linear waves within a restricted domain. © 2019 Elsevier B.V

Pilot-Symbols Aided Carrier Phase Recovery for 100G PM-QPSK Digital Coherent Receivers

A feed-forward pilot-symbols aided carrier phase recovery scheme is described. The approach relies on pilot symbols that are time-division multiplexed with the transmitted data. The main advantage of the proposed solution is that of avoiding the phase ambiguity problem after a cycle slip. For homogeneous PM-QPSK transmission the proposed scheme outperforms blind carrier recovery with differential decoding

On the benefits of phase shift keying to optical telecommunication systems

Les avantages de la modulation de phase vis-à-vis la modulation d’intensité pour les réseaux optiques sont claires et accepté par la communauté scientifique des télécommunications optiques. Surtout, la modulation de phase montre une meilleure sensibilité au bruit, ainsi qu’une plus grande tolérance aux effets non-linéaires que la modulation d’intensité. Nous présentons dans cette thése un étude qui vise à développer les avantages de la modulation de phase. Nous attaquons d’abord la complexité du récepteur en détection directe, en proposant une nouvelle configuration dont la complexité est comparable à celle du récepteur pour la modulation d’intensité traditionnel, mais avec des meilleures performances. Cette solution pourrait convenir pour les réseaux métropolitains (et même d’accès) à haut débit binaire. Nous passons ensuite à l’examen de la possibilité d’utiliser des amplificateur à semi-conducteur (SOA) au lieu des amplificateurs à fibre dopée à l’erbium pour fournir amplification optique aux signaux modulés en phase. Les non-linéarité des SOA sont étudiées, et un compensateur simple et très efficace est proposé. Les avantages des amplificateurs à semi-conducteur par rapport à ceux à fibre sont bien connus. Surtout, la méthode que nous proposons permettrait l’integrabilité des SOA avec d’autres composants de réseau (par exemple, le récepteur nommé cidessus), menant à des solutions technologiques de petite taille et efficaces d’un point de vue énergétique. Il y a deux types de systèmes pour signaux modulés en phase: basé sur la détection directe, ou sur les récepteurs cohérents. Dans le dernière partie de ce travail, nous nous concentrons sur cette dernière catégorie, et nous comparons deux solutions possibles pour la mise à niveau des réseaux terrestres actuel. Nous comparons deux configurations dont les performances sont très comparables en termes de sensibilité au bruit, mais nous montrons comment la meilleure tolérance aux effets non linéaires (en particuliers dans les systèmes à débit mixte) fait que une solution soit bien plus efficace que l’autre.The advantages of phase modulation (PM) vis-à-vis intensity modulation for optical networks are accepted by the optical telecommunication community. PM exhibits a higher noise sensitivity than intensity modulation, and it is more tolerant to the effects of fiber nonlinearity. In this thesis we examine the challenges and the benefits of working with different aspects of phase modulation. Our first contribution tackles the complexity of the direct detection noncoherent receiver for differentially encoded quadrature phase shift keying. We examine a novel configuration whose complexity is comparable to that of traditional receivers for intensity modulation, yet outperforming it. We show that under severe nonlinear impairments, our proposed receiver works almost as well as the conventional receiver, with the advantage of being much less complex. We also show that the proposed receiver is tolerant to chromatic dispersion, and to detuning of the carrier frequency. This solution might be suitable for high-bit rates metro (and even access) networks. Our second contribution deals with the challenges of using semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) instead of typical erbium doped fiber amplifiers (EDFAs) to provide amplification to phase modulated signals. SOAs nonlinearities are investigated, and we propose a simple and very effective feed-forward compensator. Above all, the method we propose would permit the integrability of SOAs with other network components (for example, the aforementioned receiver) achieving small size, power efficient sub-systems. Phase modulation paves the way to high spectral efficiency, especially when paired with digital coherent receivers. With the digital coherent receiver, the degree of freedom offered by polarization can be exploited to increase the channel bit rate without increasing its spectral occupancy. In the last part of this work we focus on polarization multiplexed signaling paired with coherent reception and digital signal processing. Our third contribution provides insight on the strategies for upgrading current terrestrial core networks to high bit rates. This is a particularly challenging scenario, as phase modulation has to coexist with previously installed intensity modulated channels. We compare two configurations which have received much attention in the literature. These solutions show comparable performance in terms of back-to-back noise sensitivity, and yet are not equivalent. We show how the superior tolerance to nonlinear fiber propagation (and particularly to cross phase modulation induced by the presence of intensity modulated channels) makes one of them much more effective than the other

Synthesis, Structural Elucidation, and Biological Evaluation of NSC12, an Orally Available Fibroblast Growth Factor (FGF) Ligand Trap for the Treatment of FGF-Dependent Lung Tumors

NSC12 is an orally available pan-FGF trap able to inhibit FGF2/FGFR interaction and endowed with promising antitumor activity. It was identified by virtual screening from a NCI small molecule library, but no data were available about its synthesis, stereochemistry, and physicochemical properties. We report here a synthetic route that allowed us to characterize and unambiguously identify the structure of the active compound by a combination of NMR spectroscopy and in silico conformational analysis. The synthetic protocol allowed us to sustain experiments aimed at assessing its therapeutic potential for the treatment of FGF-dependent lung cancers. A crucial step in the synthesis generated a couple of diastereoisomers, with only one able to act as a FGF trap molecule and to inhibit FGF-dependent receptor activation, cell proliferation, and tumor growth when tested in vitro and in vivo on murine and human lung cancer cells

Shallow Water and Navier-Stokes SPH-like numerical modelling of rapidly varying free-surface flows

In coastal engineering, Lagrangian meshless numerical methods have reached a good popularity and they have been applied with success to describe wave breaking, impact of wave on structures and other rapid phenomena. This is due to the fact that they have a number of advantages in comparison with classical Eulerian schemes: no explicit treatment of the free surface and no computational grid mean that sophisticated meshing is not needed for complex geometries and therefore a number of problems that were considered largely intractable using classical Eulerian numerical methods such as finite volume or finite elements can now be simulated. As a relatively new method in Computational Fluid Dynamics, this kind of methods may be considered immature and many fundamental aspects and key characteristics remain to be fully investigated. The solid boundary condition is such an example: imposing closed boundary conditions in meshless methods in general, and in Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamic (SPH) in particular, is still an open problem. In the first chapter of this thesis an approximate Virtual Boundary Particle Method (VBP) for solid boundary conditions in two-dimensional (2-D) SPH models is presented; this is a development of the original VBP method recently proposed by Ferrari et al. (A new 3-D parallel SPH scheme for free-surface flows, Computers \& Fluids, 38(6), 1203-1217, 2009). The aim is to maintain the zeroth moment of the kernel function as closely as possible to unity, (a property referred to as zero-consistency), for particles close to solid boundaries. The main advantage of the MVBP in comparison with other methods such as Mirrored Particles is that curved boundaries or boundaries with angles can be easily reproduced. Some authors applied the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method to integrate the Shallow Water Equations (SWE) obtaining promising results for simple test cases where no open boundaries are present and the analytical formulation of source terms are applied: with SPH the wet-dry fronts do not need any special treatment, the equations are solved just where the fluid is present and this can potentially speed up the calculations if there are large dry areas in the domain. A 2D Shallow Water code based on the SPH interpolation is developed in the chapters 2 – 4 of this work, with the aim of further improving the capability of these numerical schemes of simulating real flooding events. The SPH-SWEs code is developed following the variational formulation, thanks to this approach the numerical scheme is robust and both the total mass and the momentum are conserved. Some major improvement has been introduced in the SPH-SWEs model in order to make the simulation of real floodings feasible. The Modified Virtual Boundary Particles (MVBP) is used to describe the closed boundaries, the bottom and the friction source term is described by a set of bottom particle. This discretization is effective not just for simple test case but also in for real bathymetries. Moreover, a particle splitting procedure has been inserted: it has the purpose to avoid the lack of resolution due to the variable kernel size being inversely proportional to water depth. This splitting procedure conserves mass and momentum by varying the smoothing length, velocity and acceleration of each refined particle. This improves predictions but does not necessarily provide good shock capturing. This is improved by treating particle interactions as a Riemann problem with MUSCL reconstruction providing stability. The last limitation that inhibits the use of the SPH-SWEs for real flooding simulation is the absence of any method to impose open boundary conditions. These are introduced in chapter 4 by adopting a simplified version of the Characteristic boundary method. Both supercritical and subcritical inflow and outflow boundary conditions can be simulated. Thanks to all the improvements described above, the simulation of two real events by a SPH-SWEs is presented in chapter 4, for the first time. The first case is the Okushiri tsunami occurred in Japan in 1993, whereas the second one is a flooding flood inundation at Thamesmead (UK). In Chapter 5 the simulation of rapidly varying flows is analysed removing the hypothesis of Shallow Water flows: a meshless Lagrangian numerical model called Finite Pointset Method (FPM) for the integration of Navier-Stokes equations in presence of free-surface flow is presented. The Finite Pointset Method (FPM) is a Lagrangian meshless method for numerical integration of pure incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, applied to date just to internal flows. It belongs to SPH like family because each particle carries a vector of field quantities such as pressure, density, velocity etc. and information and physical quantities are approximated using particles in a circular neighbourhood. FPM holds also some remarkable advantages in comparison with classical SPH methods: it is based on a moving least squares approach, where particles are just interpolation points without any associated mass and this means that any order of accuracy can be reached regardless to the particle’s position. In FPM the fluid is described as purely incompressible and the Navier-Stokes equation are solved numerically by means of the projection method therefore no spurious oscillations in the pressure field are present. Moreover in FPM boundary conditions can be analytically enforced using boundary particles and fluid particles can be added and removed in order to preserve the stability of the solution. This fact represents another fundamental advantage in comparison with classical SPH. Originally the FPM has been confined to single or two phase flow, but in chapter 5 it has extended also to free-surface flows by introducing a novel algorithm for free surface detection. In addition to that, a novel formulation of the Projection Method, called Incremental Pressure Projection Method, has been applied in order to preserve the hydrostatic condition

Design for Policy: approcci e strategie per la valorizzazione e diffusione del Bilancio di Genere all'interno della comunità studentesca

È una verità universalmente riconosciuta che una persona, impegnata a realizzarsi tramite un percorso di studi o professionale, debba necessariamente esigere la parità di genere. Attualmente, il World Economic Forum stima che l’umanità sarà in grado di raggiungere questo obiettivo, ma tra 134 lunghissimi anni. Nel frattempo, le istituzioni del 2024 sono chiamate a ripensare i loro processi, hic et nunc, per compiere una duplice transizione, tecnologica ed ecologica. Prime fra tutte, le università, incaricate di preparare la comunità studentesca ad affrontare un futuro incerto: esse hanno da tempo adottato policy per ridurre il divario esistente. Tuttavia, il potenziale di questi strumenti risulta difficilmente realizzabile a causa della mancanza di mezzi per creare una significativa prossimità culturale, e coinvolgere con successo l’intera comunità universitaria. Nello specifico, l* student* ad oggi non interagiscono con strumenti come i Gender Equity Plan, il Piano per le Azioni Positive e il Bilancio di Genere, che permetterebbero loro di partecipare in modo consapevole e aiutare l’Ateneo a visualizzare un futuro diverso. Gènera è un progetto che cerca di colmare questo gap e di produrre nuove occasioni per parlare di genere, a partire dall’analisi del Bilancio di Genere. La “fucina femminista” s’inserisce all’interno dei percorsi Unibo per lo sviluppo di competenze trasversali, e punta a formare l* studenti alle tematiche di genere e a guidarl* nell’esplorazione creativa di problematiche legate al divario di genere in università, tramite l’utilizzo del design thinking e di metodi performativi, con un approccio hands on e project-based. Il format ideato può essere riproposto e adattato ad altre tematiche dell’attualità, così come ad altri documenti programmatici, e può diventare il punto di partenza per la creazione di best-practices condivisibili con altre istituzioni, o con l* cittadin*, nell’ambito, per esempio, della Terza Missione

Simulation of the December 2017 Flood on the Enza River using a 2D SWE code Coupled with a Levee Breach Erosion Model

The levee breach that occurred on the Enza River (Italy) on December 12th 2017 and the resulting flood are simulated with a GPU-accelerated 2D SWE code, where a simple erosion model was implemented to describe the breach evolution in detail

Nonlinear impairment compensation using expectation maximization for dispersion managed and unmanaged PDM 16-QAM transmission

In this paper, we show numerically and experimentally that expectation maximization (EM) algorithm is a powerful tool in combating system impairments such as fibre nonlinearities, inphase and quadrature (I/Q) modulator imperfections and laser linewidth. The EM algorithm is an iterative algorithm that can be used to compensate for the impairments which have an imprint on a signal constellation, i.e. rotation and distortion of the constellation points. The EM is especially effective for combating non-linear phase noise (NLPN). It is because NLPN severely distorts the signal constellation and this can be tracked by the EM. The gain in the nonlinear system tolerance for the system under consideration is shown to be dependent on the transmission scenario. We show experimentally that for a dispersion managed polarization multiplexed 16-QAM system at 14 Gbaud a gain in the nonlinear system tolerance of up to 3 dB can be obtained. For, a dispersion unmanaged system this gain reduces to 0.5 dB