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Emulsion fuels have the potential to reduce both particulate matter and NOx emissions and can potentially improve the efficiency of combustion engines. However, their limited stability remains a critical barrier to practical use as an alternative fuel. In this study, we explore the evaporation behavior of thermodynamically stable water-in-oil microemulsions. The water-in-oil microemulsion droplets prepared from different types of oil were acoustically levitated and heated using a continuous laser at different irradiation intensities. We show that the evaporation characteristics of these microemulsions can be controlled by varying water-to-surfactant molar ratio ({\omega}) and volume fraction of the dispersed phase ({\phi}). The emulsion droplets undergo three distinct stages of evaporation, namely pre-heating, steady evaporation, and unsteady evaporation. During the steady evaporation phase, increasing {\phi} reduces the evaporation rate for a fixed {\omega}. It is observed that the evaporation of microemulsion is governed by the complex interplay between its constituents and their properties. We propose a parameter ({\eta}) denoting the volume fraction ratio between volatile and non-volatile components, which indicates the cumulative influence of various factors affecting the evaporation process. The evaporation of microemulsions eventually leads to the formation of solid spherical shells, which may undergo buckling. The distinction in the morphology of these shells is explored in detail using SEM imaging., Comment: 42 pages, 11 figures

Polymer droplets subjected to a heated environment have significance in several fields ranging from spray drying and powder formation to surface coating. In the present work, we investigate the evaporation of a high viscoelastic modulus aqueous polymeric droplet in an acoustically levitated environment. Depending on the laser irradiation intensity, we observe nucleation of a bubble in the dilute regime of polymer concentration, contrary to the previously observed bubble nucleation in a semi-dilute entangled regime for low viscoelastic modulus polymer droplets. After the bubble nucleation, a quasi steady bubble growth occurs depending on the laser irradiation intensity and concentrations. Our scaling analysis reveals that bubble growth follows Plesset-Zwick criteria independent of the viscoelastic properties of the polymer solution. Further, we establish that the onset of bubble growth has an inverse nonlinear dependence on the laser irradiation intensity. At high concentrations and laser irradiation intensities, we report the expansion and collapse of polymer membrane without rupture, indicating the formation of an interfacial skin with significant strength. The droplet oscillations are primarily driven by the presence of multiple bubbles and, to some extent, by the rotational motion of the droplet. Finally, depending on the nature of bubble growth, different types of precipitate form contrary to the different modes of atomization observed in low viscoelastic modulus polymer droplets.

In this paper, an adaptive super-twisting controller is designed for an agile maneuvering quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle to achieve accurate trajectory tracking in the presence of external disturbances. A cascaded control architecture is designed to determine the desired accelerations using the proposed controller and subsequently used to compute the desired orientation and angular rates. The finite-time convergence of sliding functions and closed-loop system stability are analytically proven. Furthermore, the restrictive assumption on the maximum variation of the disturbance is relaxed by designing a gain adaptation law and low-pass filtering of the estimated equivalent control. The proper selection of design parameters is discussed in detail. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed method is evaluated by high-fidelity software-in-the-loop simulations and validated by experimental studies., Comment: We are working on a new version of this paper and revising some technical parts. We will replace the new version as soon as it is carefully revised

In this paper, we investigate requirements to prepare an application for Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA), regulated by European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) to obtain flight authorization for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operations and propose some perspectives to automate the approach based on our successful application. Preparation of SORA requires expert knowledge as it contains technicalities. Also, the whole process is an iterative and time-consuming one. It is even more challenging for higher-risk operations, such as those in urban environments, near airports, and multi- and customized models for research activities. SORA process limits the potential socio-economic impacts of innovative UAV capabilities. Therefore, in this paper, we present a SORA example, review the steps and highlight challenges. Accordingly, we propose an alternative workflow, considering the same steps, while addressing the challenges and pitfalls, to shorten the whole process. Furthermore, we present a comprehensive list of preliminary technical procedures, including the pre/during/post-flight checklists, design and installation appraisal, flight logbook, operational manual, training manual, and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which are not explicitly instructed in SORA manual. Moreover, we propose the initial idea to create an automated SORA workflow to facilitate obtaining authorization, which is significantly helpful for operators, especially the scientific community, to conduct experimental operations.

This paper presents an integrated approach that combines trajectory optimization and Artificial Potential Field (APF) method for real-time optimal Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) trajectory planning and dynamic collision avoidance. A minimum-time trajectory optimization problem is formulated with initial and final positions as boundary conditions and collision avoidance as constraints. It is transcribed into a nonlinear programming problem using Chebyshev pseudospectral method. The state and control histories are approximated by using Lagrange polynomials and the collocation points are used to satisfy constraints. A novel sigmoid-type collision avoidance constraint is proposed to overcome the drawbacks of Lagrange polynomial approximation in pseudospectral methods that only guarantees inequality constraint satisfaction only at nodal points. Automatic differentiation of cost function and constraints is used to quickly determine their gradient and Jacobian, respectively. An APF method is used to update the optimal control inputs for guaranteeing collision avoidance. The trajectory optimization and APF method are implemented in a closed-loop fashion continuously, but in parallel at moderate and high frequencies, respectively. The initial guess for the optimization is provided based on the previous solution. The proposed approach is tested and validated through indoor experiments.

The experimental mass data from the Atomic Mass Compilation - 2012 (AMC12) has been analyzed for two-neutron separation energies (S$_{2n}$), two-proton separation energies (S$_{2p}$), double-beta decay energies (Q$_{2\beta^-}$), and four-beta decay energies (Q$_{4\beta^-}$) and plotted against neutron number and mass number, respectively. A new weighted slope method of extrapolation, tested for known and new mass measurements, has been used to obtain the extrapolated mass values with better precision for more than 1100 nuclei far from the valley of stability, out of which more than 100 are being reported for the first time. A comparison has been made with five of the popular mass models with reference to experimental extrapolated masses from the present work and the Atomic Mass Evaluation 2016 (AME16). The extrapolated experimental atomic mass data will be very useful for both experimentalists and mass-model theoreticians, as well as in simulations of astrophysical r-processes., Comment: Tables/data sets 2-5 in the article are available in spreadsheet (.xlsx) format through Figshare (reference 22 in the article)

Intensity fluctuations in supercontinuum generation are studied in polarization-maintaining (PM) and non-PM all-normal dispersion tellurite photonic crystal fibers. Dispersive Fourier transformation is used to resolve the shot-to-shot spectra generated using 225 fs pump pulses at 1.55 {\mu}m, with experimental results well reproduced by vector and scalar numerical simulations. By comparing the relative intensity noise for the PM and non-PM cases, supported by simulations, we demonstrate the advantage of the polarization-maintaining property of the PM fibers in preserving low-noise dynamics. We associate the low-noise in the PM case with the suppression of polarization modulation instability., Comment: Shreesha Rao D. S., Tanvi Karpate, Amar Nath Ghosh, Iv\'an B. Gonzalo, Mariusz Klimczak, Dariusz Pysz, Ryszard Buczy\'nski, Cyril Billet, Ole Bang, John M. Dudley, and Thibaut Sylvestre, "Noise in supercontinuum generated using PM and non-PM tellurite glass all-normal dispersion fibers". Optics Letters 47.10 (May 2022), pp. 2550-2553

The photonic modes mediated absorption dynamics at femtosecond time scales along with the control of spontaneous emission tunability are investigated all-dielectric optical microcavity having BaTiO3 (BTO) as defect layer. The cavity-enhanced transient absorption reveals the dominant excited state absorption (ESA) of both photonic and electronic modes due to strong third-order optical nonlinearity influence. Photoluminescence of BTO is found to be guided and tuned by the photonic cavity mode. Such active photonic structures can be envisaged as a potential candidate in nonlinear optics and photonic device applications., Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, iNEEBA 2021 Conference, Paper ID: OP-ESC-07

In this paper, we propose a photorealistic style transfer network to emphasize the natural effect of photorealistic image stylization. In general, distortion of the image content and lacking of details are two typical issues in the style transfer field. To this end, we design a novel framework employing the U-Net structure to maintain the rich spatial clues, with a multi-layer feature aggregation (MFA) method to simultaneously provide the details obtained by the shallow layers in the stylization processing. In particular, an encoder based on the dense block and a decoder form a symmetrical structure of U-Net are jointly staked to realize an effective feature extraction and image reconstruction. Besides, a transfer module based on MFA and "adaptive instance normalization" (AdaIN) is inserted in the skip connection positions to achieve the stylization. Accordingly, the stylized image possesses the texture of a real photo and preserves rich content details without introducing any mask or post-processing steps. The experimental results on public datasets demonstrate that our method achieves a more faithful structural similarity with a lower style loss, reflecting the effectiveness and merit of our approach.

Droplet-droplet interactions is ubiquitous in various applications ranging from medical diagnostics to enhancing and optimizing liquid jet propulsion. We employ an experimental technique where the laser pulse interacts with a micron-sized droplet and causes optical breakdown. The synergy of a nanosecond laser pulse and an isolated spherical droplet is accurately controlled and manipulated to influence the deformation and fragmentation of an array of droplets. We elucidate how the fluid dynamic response (such as drop-drop and shock-drop interactions) of an arrangement of droplets can be regulated and optimally shaped by laser pulse energy and its interplay with the optical density of liquid target. A new butterfly type breakup is revealed, which is found to result in controlled and efficient fragmentation of the outer droplets in an array. The spatio-temporal characteristics of a laser-induced breakdown dictate how shock wave and central droplet fragments can influence outer droplets. The incident laser energy and pulse width employed in this work are representative of diverse industrial applications such as surface cleaning, nano-lithography, microelectronics, and medical procedures such as intraocular microsurgery.

One-dimensional (1D) metal-dielectric (MD) periodic structures take advantage of large refractive index contrast between metal and dielectrics to invoke extremely high nonlinear ultrafast responses of metal. These structures are also special due to their extremely high laser damage threshold. The Bragg like 1D MD structure (Ag/SiO2)4 enables strong optical field confinement with much enhanced nonlinear features as compared to simple metal or single (Ag/SiO2)1 structure. In the present work, the ultrafast nonlinear optical responses of the above structures are investigated via femtosecond broadband optical pump-probe technique. The enhanced nonlinear optical absorption is of reverse saturation of absorption (RSA) nature, resulted due to free-carrier absorption (FCA) and excited-state absorption (ESA) processes. The spectral nonlinearities are closely related to the pump-induced modification of the metal's dielectric functions, which are qualitatively visualized by transfer matrix and two-temperature models. The ultrafast temporal evolution of nonlinear absorption clearly demonstrated enhanced optical nonlinearity, disentangled by the electron-electron and electron-phonon dynamic interactions at picosecond time scales. A phenomenological pulse propagation model is employed that incorporates the experimentally obtained nonlinear absorption coefficients and different nonlinear effects exhibited by the system. Nonlinearity plays a crucial role in controlling the ultrafast pulse propagation and could open a new window for many nonlinear device applications. The findings of these new optical materials could possibly pave the way for promising applications in ultrafast photonics., Comment: (23 main text + 9 supplementary) pages, (7 main text + 8 supplementary) figures

We present the first demonstration of shot-noise limited supercontinuum-based spectral domain optical coherence tomography (SD-OCT) with axial resolution of 5.9 $\mu$m at a center wavelength of 1370 nm. Current supercontinuum-based SD-OCT systems cannot be operated in the shot-noise limited detection regime because of severe pulse-to-pulse relative intensity noise of the supercontinuum source. To overcome this disadvantage we have developed a low-noise supercontinuum source based on an all-normal dispersion (ANDi) fiber, pumped by a femtosecond laser. The noise performance of our 90 MHz ANDi supercontinuum source is compared to that of two commercial sources operating at 80 and 320 MHz repetition rate. We show that the low noise of the ANDi supercontinuum source improves the OCT images significantly in terms of both higher contrast, better sensitivity, and improved penetration. From SD-OCT imaging of skin, retina, and multi-layer stacks we conclude that supercontinuum-based SD-OCT can enter the domain of shot-noise limited detection., Comment: 14 pages, 6 combined images

We experimentally investigate the dissolution of microscale sessile alcohol droplets in water under the influence of impermeable vertical confinement. The introduction of confinement suppresses the mass transport from the droplet to bulk medium in comparison with the non-confined counterpart. Along with a buoyant plume, flow visualization reveals that the dissolution of a confined droplet is hindered by a newly identified mechanism - levitated toroidal vortex. The morphological changes in the flow due to the vortex-induced impediment alters the dissolution rate, resulting in enhancement of droplet lifetime. Further, we have proposed a modification in the key non-dimensional parameters (Rayleigh number $Ra^{'}$ (signifying buoyancy) and Sherwood number $Sh^{'}$ (signifying mass flux)) and droplet lifetime $\tau_{c}^{'}$, based on the hypothesis of linearly stratified droplet surroundings (with revised concentration difference $\Delta C^{'}$), taking into account the geometry of the confinements. We show that experimental results on droplet dissolution under vertical confinement corroborate universal scaling relations $Sh^{'} \sim Ra^{' 1/4}$ and $\tau_{c}^{'} \sim \Delta C^{'-5/4}$. We also draw attention to the fact that the revised scaling law incorporating the geometry of confinements proposed in the present work can be extended to other known configurations such as droplet dissolution inside a range of channel dimensions, as encountered in a gamut of applications such as micro-fluidic technology and biomedical engineering., Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures

We delineate and examine the distinct breakup modes of evaporating water-in-oil emulsion droplets under acoustic levitation. The emulsion droplets consist of decane/dodecane/tetradecane as oil, while the water concentration is varied from 10% to 30% (v/v). The droplets were heated under different laser irradiation intensities and were observed to exhibit three broad breakup mechanisms, viz., breakup through bubble growth, sheet breakup, and catastrophic breakup. The occurrence of these modes of the breakup is found to be primarily dependent on the volatility differential among the components. Early nucleation in water/decane emulsions results in the growth of vapor bubble, which is characterized by intricate patterns of wave propagation on the droplet surface. The formation of these patterns suggests that the short time scale and length scale of wave patterns is the manifestation of Faraday instability, triggered on the droplet surface by the acoustic field induced resonance. A sheet-like breakup, on the contrary, occurs predominantly in emulsions comprising of components with relatively high volatility difference (water/dodecane emulsions) due to the breakup of an indiscernible small sized bubble. Intense catastrophic breakup occurs for emulsions with significantly vast volatility difference (water/tetradecane emulsions) where the droplet undergoes prompt fragmentation into fine secondary droplets., Comment: 36 pages, 19 figures

Spin bath polarization is the key to enhancing the sensitivity of quantum sensing and information processing. Significant effort has been invested in identifying the consequences of quantumness and its control for spin-bath polarization. Here, by contrast, we focus on the adverse role of quantum correlations (entanglement) in a spin bath that can impede its cooling in many realistic scenarios. We propose to remove this impediment by modified cooling schemes, incorporating probe-induced disentanglement via alternating, non-commuting probe-bath interactions, so as to suppress the buildup of quantum correlations in the bath. The resulting bath polarization is thereby exponentially enhanced. The underlying thermodynamic principles have far-reaching implications for quantum technological applications, Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

Machine Learning models, extensively used for various multimedia applications, are offered to users as a blackbox service on the Cloud on a pay-per-query basis. Such blackbox models are commercially valuable to adversaries, making them vulnerable to extraction attacks to reverse engineer the proprietary model thereby violating the model privacy and Intellectual Property. Here, the adversary first extracts the model architecture or hyperparameters through side channel leakage, followed by stealing the functionality of the target model by training the reconstructed architecture on a synthetic dataset. While the attacks proposed in literature are empirical, there is a need for a theoretical framework to measure the information leaked under such extraction attacks. To this extent, in this work, we propose a novel probabilistic framework, Airavata, to estimate the information leakage in such model extraction attacks. This framework captures the fact that extracting the exact target model is difficult due to experimental uncertainty while inferring model hyperparameters and stochastic nature of training to steal the target model functionality. Specifically, we use Bayesian Networks to capture uncertainty in estimating the target model under various extraction attacks based on the subjective notion of probability. We validate the proposed framework under different adversary assumptions commonly adopted in literature to reason about the attack efficacy. This provides a practical tool to infer actionable details about extracting blackbox models and help identify the best attack combination which maximises the knowledge extracted (or information leaked) from the target model.

Artificial Intelligence systems require a through assessment of different pillars of trust, namely, fairness, interpretability, data and model privacy, reliability (safety) and robustness against against adversarial attacks. While these research problems have been extensively studied in isolation, an understanding of the trade-off between different pillars of trust is lacking. To this extent, the trade-off between fault tolerance, privacy and adversarial robustness is evaluated for the specific case of Deep Neural Networks, by considering two adversarial settings under a security and a privacy threat model. Specifically, this work studies the impact of the fault tolerance of the Neural Network on training the model by adding noise to the input (Adversarial Robustness) and noise to the gradients (Differential Privacy). While training models with noise to inputs, gradients or weights enhances fault tolerance, it is observed that adversarial robustness and fault tolerance are at odds with each other. On the other hand, ($\epsilon,\delta$)-Differentially Private models enhance the fault tolerance, measured using generalisation error, theoretically has an upper bound of $e^{\epsilon} - 1 + \delta$. This novel study of the trade-off between different elements of trust is pivotal for training a model which satisfies the requirements for different pillars of trust simultaneously.

Deep Learning Accelerators are prone to faults which manifest in the form of errors in Neural Networks. Fault Tolerance in Neural Networks is crucial in real-time safety critical applications requiring computation for long durations. Neural Networks with high regularisation exhibit superior fault tolerance, however, at the cost of classification accuracy. In the view of difference in functionality, a Neural Network is modelled as two separate networks, i.e, the Feature Extractor with unsupervised learning objective and the Classifier with a supervised learning objective. Traditional approaches of training the entire network using a single supervised learning objective is insufficient to achieve the objectives of the individual components optimally. In this work, a novel multi-criteria objective function, combining unsupervised training of the Feature Extractor followed by supervised tuning with Classifier Network is proposed. The unsupervised training solves two games simultaneously in the presence of adversary neural networks with conflicting objectives to the Feature Extractor. The first game minimises the loss in reconstructing the input image for indistinguishability given the features from the Extractor, in the presence of a generative decoder. The second game solves a minimax constraint optimisation for distributional smoothening of feature space to match a prior distribution, in the presence of a Discriminator network. The resultant strongly regularised Feature Extractor is combined with the Classifier Network for supervised fine-tuning. The proposed Adversarial Fault Tolerant Neural Network Training is scalable to large networks and is independent of the architecture. The evaluation on benchmarking datasets: FashionMNIST and CIFAR10, indicates that the resultant networks have high accuracy with superior tolerance to stuck at "0" faults compared to widely used regularisers., Comment: MobiQuitous 2020

Atomization of emulsion droplets is ubiquitous across a variety of application domains ranging from NextGen combustors to fabrication of biomedical implants. An understanding of the atomization mechanism in emulsions can result in a paradigm shift in customized designs of efficient systems, be it in energy or biotechnology sectors. In this paper, we specifically study the breakup mechanism of an evaporating contact-free (acoustic levitation) emulsion droplet (water-oil) under external heating. Three distinct regimes are observed during the lifespan of the evaporating droplet. Initially, the droplet diameter regresses linearly with time, followed by vapor bubble nucleation due to a significant difference in the boiling temperature among the components of the emulsion. The collapse of this bubble results in a high-intensity breakup of the droplet leading to the propulsion of residual liquid in the form of a crown-like sheet. The area of the expanding crown varies linearly with the square of the time. It is hypothesized that the expansion of the liquid sheet centrifuges the larger water sub-droplets towards the edge, resulting in unique spatial segregation. Subsequently, we report the first observation of complex patches (representing water sub-droplets) and the rupture of the thin sheet adjacent to patches into holes (with hole growth rate ranging from 1.2 to 1.4 m/s) in the context of an evaporating isolated emulsion droplet. The hole formation results in the creation of ligaments which undergo breakup into secondary droplets with Sauter mean diameter (SMD) ~ 50 {\mu}m., Comment: 22 pages and 8 figures

In this paper we numerically study supercontinuum generation by pumping a silicon nitride waveguide, with two zero-dispersion wavelengths, with femtosecond pulses. The waveguide dispersion is designed so that the pump pulse is in the normal-dispersion regime. We show that because of self-phase modulation, the initial pulse broadens into the anomalous-dispersion regime, which is sandwiched between the two normal-dispersion regimes, and here a soliton is formed. The interaction of the soliton and the broadened pulse in the normal-dispersion regime causes additional spectral broadening through formation of dispersive waves by non-degenerate four-wave mixing and cross-phase modulation. This broadening occurs mainly towards the second normal-dispersion regime. We show that pumping in either normal-dispersion regime allows broadening towards the other normal-dispersion regime. This ability to steer the continuum extension towards the direction of the other normal-dispersion regime beyond the sandwiched anomalous-dispersion regime underlies the directional supercontinuum notation. We numerically confirm the approach in a standard silica microstructured fiber geometry with two zero-dispersion wavelengths.

While the network traffic has seen exponential increase, the revenues have not maintained the same pace. New methods have to be explored to reduce this gap between traffic and revenue. One such method is convergence in networking layers. In this work, we study the convergence of OTN and DWDM layer from a network planning perspective. We compare the costs of planning networks without and with convergence and show that the multilayer planning offers least cost for higher traffic volumes., Comment: Pages: 1-6, Published in: 2015 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Networks and Telecommuncations Systems (ANTS), Date of Conference: 15-18 Dec. 2015, Publisher: IEEE, Electronic ISBN: 978-1-5090-0293-1, USB ISBN:978-1-5090-0292-4

Deep learning is gaining importance in many applications. However, Neural Networks face several security and privacy threats. This is particularly significant in the scenario where Cloud infrastructures deploy a service with Neural Network model at the back end. Here, an adversary can extract the Neural Network parameters, infer the regularization hyperparameter, identify if a data point was part of the training data, and generate effective transferable adversarial examples to evade classifiers. This paper shows how a Neural Network model is susceptible to timing side channel attack. In this paper, a black box Neural Network extraction attack is proposed by exploiting the timing side channels to infer the depth of the network. Although, constructing an equivalent architecture is a complex search problem, it is shown how Reinforcement Learning with knowledge distillation can effectively reduce the search space to infer a target model. The proposed approach has been tested with VGG architectures on CIFAR10 data set. It is observed that it is possible to reconstruct substitute models with test accuracy close to the target models and the proposed approach is scalable and independent of type of Neural Network architectures.

Heat-Bath Algorithmic cooling (HBAC) techniques provide ways to selectively enhance the polarization of target quantum subsystems. However, the cooling in these techniques are bounded. Here we report the first experimental observation of the HBAC cooling bound. We use HBAC to hyperpolarize nuclear spins in diamond. Using two carbon nuclear spins as the source of polarization (reset) and the 14N nuclear spin as the computation bit, we demonstrate that repeating a single cooling step increases the polarization beyond the initial reset polarization and reaches the cooling limit of HBAC. We benchmark the performance of our experiment over a range of variable reset polarization. With the ability to polarize the reset spins to different initial polarizations, we envisage that the proposed model could serve as a test bed for studies on Quantum Thermodynamics., Comment: 5 pages,3 figures

A pure silica photonic crystal fiber with a group velocity dispersion ($\beta_2$) of 4 ps$^2$/km at 1.55 $\mu$m and less than 7 ps$^2$/km from 1.32 $\mu$m to the zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) 1.80 $\mu$m was designed and fabricated. The dispersion of the fiber was measured experimentally and found to agree with the fiber design, which also provides low loss below 1.83 $\mu$m due to eight outer rings with increased hole diameter. The fiber was pumped with a 1.55 $\mu$m, 125 fs laser and, at the maximum in-coupled peak power (P$_0$) of 9 kW, a 1.34$-$1.82 $\mu$m low-noise spectrum with a relative intensity noise below 2.2\% was measured. The numerical modeling agreed very well with the experiments and showed that P$_0$ could be increased to 26 kW before noise from solitons above the ZDW started to influence the spectrum by pushing high-noise dispersive waves through the spectrum.

In a dual-frequency liquid crystal (DFLC), when the frequency of the applied voltage is more than a critical value ($f_c$), the dielectric anisotropy of the material changes from positive to negative. This causes the director to switch its orientation from parallel to the field (for $f < f_c$), to perpendicular to it ($f > f_c$). Hence DFLC can be used in modulating the light by switching the frequency of an externally applied voltage. We present in this work about application of DFLCs in full Stokes polarimetery. A polarization modulator has been worked out based on two DFLCs and two static retarders. The combination of DFLCs' switching and static retarders are chosen such that more or less equal weightage is given to all the Stokes parameters. Initial results on the optimization of position angles of the modulators are presented towards the goal of achieving polychromatic modulator in the wavelength range 600-900 nm., Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures

We demonstrate the role of measurement back-action of a coherent spin environment on the dynamics of a spin (qubit) coupled to it, by inducing non-classical (Quantum Random Walk like) statistics on its measurement trajectory. We show how the long-life time of the spin-bath allows it to correlate measurements of the qubit over many repetitions. We have used Nitrogen Vacancy centers in diamond as a model system, and the projective single-shot readout of the electron spin at low temperatures to simulate these effects. We show that the proposed theoretical model, explains the experimentally observed statistics and their application for quantum state engineering of spin ensembles towards desired states., Comment: 5 pages, 3 Figures

Anonymous networks have enabled secure and anonymous communication between the users and service providers while maintaining their anonymity and privacy. The hidden services in the networks are dynamic and continuously change their domains and service features to maintain anonymity and prevent fingerprinting. This makes modelling of such networks a challenging task. Further, modelling with crisp graphs is not suitable as they cannot capture the dynamic nature of the anonymous networks. In this work, we model the anonymous networks using fuzzy graphs and provide a methodology to simulate and analyze an anonymous network. We consider the case studies of two popular anonymous communication networks: Tor and Freenet, and show how the two networks can be analyzed using our proposed fuzzy representation.

Multicast communication plays a crucial role in Mobile Adhoc Networks (MANETs). MANETs provide low cost, self configuring devices for multimedia data communication in military battlefield scenarios, disaster and public safety networks (PSN). Multicast communication improves the network performance in terms of bandwidth consumption, battery power and routing overhead as compared to unicast for same volume of data communication. In recent past, a number of multicast routing protocols (MRPs) have been proposed that tried to resolve issues and challenges in MRP. Multicast based group communication demands dynamic construction of efficient and reliable route for multimedia data communication during high node mobility, contention, routing and channel overhead. This paper gives an insight into the merits and demerits of the currently known research techniques and provides a better environment to make reliable MRP. It presents a ample study of various Quality of Service (QoS) techniques and existing enhancement in mesh based MRPs. Mesh topology based MRPs are classified according to their enhancement in routing mechanism and QoS modification on On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP) protocol to improve performance metrics. This paper covers the most recent, robust and reliable QoS and Mesh based MRPs, classified based on their operational features, with their advantages and limitations, and provides comparison of their performance parameters., Comment: 20 pages, 10 Figures

The combustion characteristics of ethanol/Jet A-1 fuel droplets having three different proportions of ethanol (10%, 30%, and 50% by vol.) are investigated in the present study. The large volatility differential between ethanol and Jet A-1 and the nominal immiscibility of the fuels seem to result in combustion characteristics that are rather different from our previous work on butanol/Jet A-1 droplets (miscible blends). Abrupt explosion was facilitated in fuel droplets comprising lower proportions of ethanol (10%), possibly due to insufficient nucleation sites inside the droplet and the partially unmixed fuel mixture. For the fuel droplets containing higher proportions of ethanol (30% and 50%), micro-explosion occurred through homogeneous nucleation, leading to the ejection of secondary droplets and subsequent significant reduction in the overall droplet lifetime. The rate of bubble growth is nearly similar in all the blends of ethanol; however, the evolution of ethanol vapor bubble is significantly faster than that of a vapor bubble in the blends of butanol. The probability of disruptive behavior is considerably higher in ethanol/Jet A-1 blends than that of butanol/Jet A-1 blends. The Sauter mean diameter of the secondary droplets produced from micro-explosion is larger for blends with a higher proportion of ethanol. Both abrupt explosion and micro-explosion create a large-scale distortion of the flame, which surrounds the parent droplet. The secondary droplets generated from abrupt explosion undergo rapid evaporation whereas the secondary droplets from micro-explosion carry their individual flame and evaporate slowly. The growth of vapor bubble was also witnessed in the secondary droplets, which leads to the further breakup of the droplet (puffing/micro-explosion)., Comment: 23 pages, 13 figures

The present investigation deals with the puffing and micro-explosion characteristics in the combustion of a single droplet comprising butanol/Jet A-1, acetone-butanol-ethanol (A-B-E)/Jet A-1 blends, and A-B-E. The onset of nucleation, growth of vapor bubble and subsequent breakup of droplet for various fuel blends have been analyzed from the high-speed images. Puffing was observed to be the dominant phenomenon in 30% butanol blend, while micro-explosion was found to be the dominant one in other fuel blends (blend with 50% butanol or 30% A-B-E or 50% A-B-E). It was observed that puffing always preceded the micro-explosion. The probability of micro-explosion in droplets with A-B-E blends was found to be higher than that of butanol blends. Although the rate of bubble growth was almost similar for all butanol and A-B-E blends, the final bubble diameter before the droplet breakup was found to be higher for 50/50 blends than that of 30/70 blends. The occurrence of micro-explosion shortened the droplet lifetime, and this effect appeared to be stronger for droplets with 50/50 composition. Micro-explosion led to the ejection of both larger and smaller secondary droplets; however, puffing resulted in relatively smaller secondary droplets compared to micro-explosion. Puffing/micro-explosion were also observed in the secondary droplets., Comment: Submitted to Combustion Science and Technology

Dynamical polarization of nuclear spin ensembles is of central importance for magnetic resonance studies, precision sensing and for applications in quantum information theory. Here we propose a scheme to generate long-lived singlet pairs in an unpolarized nuclear spin ensemble which is dipolar coupled to the electron spins of a Nitrogen Vacancy center in diamond. The quantum mechanical back-action induced by frequent spin-selective readout of the NV centers allows the nuclear spins to pair up into maximally entangled singlet pairs. Counterintuitively, the robustness of the pair formation to dephasing noise improves with increasing size of the spin ensemble. We also show how the paired nuclear spin state allows for enhanced sensing capabilities of NV centers in diamond., Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures

Generating robust entanglement among solid-state spins is key for applications in quantum information processing and precision sensing. We show here a dissipative approach to generate such entanglement among the hyperfine coupled electron nuclear spins using the rapid optical decay of electronic excited states. The combined dark state interference effects of the optical and microwave driving fields in the presence of spontaneous emission from the short-lived excited state leads to a dissipative formation of an entangled steady state. We show that the dissipative entanglement is generated for any initial state conditions of the spins and is resilient to external field fluctuations. We analyze the scheme both for continuous and pulsed driving fields in the presence of realistic noise sources., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

Bound- and excited-state electronic nonlinearities in CdS quantum dots have been investigated by Degenerate Four-Wave Mixing (DFWM) and Z-scan techniques in the femtosecond time regime. This QD sample shows Kerr-type nonlinearity for incident beam intensity below 0.18 TW/cm$^2$. However, further increment in intensity results in four-photon absorption (4PA) indicated by open- and closed-aperture Z-scan experiments. Comparing open-aperture Z-scan experimental results with theoretical models, the 4PA coefficient $\alpha_4$ has been deduced. Furthermore, third-order nonlinear index $\gamma$ and refractive-index change coefficient $\sigma_r$ corresponding to excited-state electrons due to 4PA have been calculated from the closed-aperture Z-scan results. UV-visible absorption and photoluminescence experimental results are analyzed towards estimating band gap energy and defect state energy. Time Correlated Single Photon Counting (TCSPC) was employed to determine the decay time corresponding to band-edge and defect states. The linear and nonlinear optical techniques have allowed the direct observation of lower and higher-order electronic states in CdS quantum dots.

We propose a method to achieve high degree control of nanomechanical oscillators by coupling their mechanical motion to single spins. By manipulating the spin alone and measuring its quantum state heralds the cooling or squeezing of the oscillator even for weak spin-oscillator couplings. We analytically show that the asymptotic behavior of the oscillator is determined by a spin-induced thermal filter function whose overlap with the initial thermal distribution of the oscillator determines its cooling, heating or squeezing. Counterintuitively, the rate of cooling dependence on the instantaneous thermal occupancy of the oscillator renders robust cooling or squeezing even for high initial temperatures and damping rates. We further estimate how the proposed scheme can be used to control the motion of a thin diamond cantilever by coupling it to its defect centers at low temperature., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures

Hybrid quantum systems (HQSs) have attracted several research interests in the last years. In this Letter, we report on the design, fabrication, and characterization of a novel diamond architecture for HQSs that consists of a high quality thin circular diamond membrane with embedded near-surface nitrogen-vacancy centers (NVCs). To demonstrate this architecture, we employed the NVCs by means of their optical and spin interfaces as nanosensors of the motion of the membrane under static pressure and in-resonance vibration, as well as the residual stress of the membrane. Driving the membrane at its fundamental resonance mode, we observed coupling of this vibrational mode to the spin of the NVCs by Hahn echo signal. Our realization of this architecture will enable futuristic HQS-based applications in diamond piezometry and vibrometry, as well as spin-mechanical and mechanically mediated spin-spin coupling in quantum information science., Comment: 6 Pages, 4 Figures

Building a quantum repeater network for long distance quantum communication requires photons and quantum registers that comprise qubits for interaction with light, good memory capabilities and processing qubits for storage and manipulation of photons. Here we demonstrate a key step, the coherent transfer of a photon in a single solid-state nuclear spin qubit with an average fidelity of 98% and storage over 10 seconds. The storage process is achieved by coherently transferring a photon to an entangled electron-nuclear spin state of a nitrogen vacancy centre in diamond, confirmed by heralding through high fidelity single-shot readout of the electronic spin states. Stored photon states are robust against repetitive optical writing operations, required for repeater nodes. The photon-electron spin interface and the nuclear spin memory demonstrated here constitutes a major step towards practical quantum networks, and surprisingly also paves the way towards a novel entangled photon source for photonic quantum computing.

We propose a scheme to increase the sensitivity and thus the detection volume of nanoscale single molecule magnetic resonance imaging. The proposal aims to surpass the T1 limited detection of the sensor by taking advantage of a long-lived ancilla nuclear spin to which the sensor is coupled. We show how this nuclear spin takes over the role of the sensor spin, keeping the characteristic time-scales of detection on the same order but with a longer life-time allowing it to detect a larger volume of the sample which is not possible by the sensor alone., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Faraday Discussions

We present a scheme to generate entangled photons using the NV centers in diamond. We show how the long-lived nuclear spin in diamond can mediate entanglement between multiple photons thereby increasing the length of entangled photon string. With the proposed scheme one could generate both n-photon GHZ and cluster states. We present an experimental scheme realizing the same and estimating the rate of entanglement generation both in the presence and absence of a cavity., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures

We propose an efficient method to filter out single atoms from trapped ensembles with unknown number of atoms. The method employs stimulated adiabatic passage to reversibly transfer a single atom to the Rydberg state which blocks subsequent Rydberg excitation of all the other atoms within the ensemble. This triggers the excitation of Rydberg blockaded atoms to short lived intermediate states and their subsequent decay to untrapped states. Using an auxiliary microwave field to carefully engineer the dissipation, we obtain a nearly deterministic single-atom source. Our method is applicable to small atomic ensembles in individual microtraps and in lattice arrays.

We propose a scheme that employs dissipation to deterministically generate entanglement in an ensemble of strongly interacting Rydberg atoms. With a combination of microwave driving between different Rydberg levels and a resonant laser coupling to a short lived atomic state, the ensemble can be driven towards a dark steady state that entangles all atoms. The long-range resonant dipole-dipole interaction between different Rydberg states extends the entanglement beyond the van der Walls interaction range with perspectives for entangling large and distant ensembles., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

With the surge in modern research focus towards Pervasive Computing, lot of techniques and challenges needs to be addressed so as to effectively create smart spaces and achieve miniaturization. In the process of scaling down to compact devices, the real things to ponder upon are the Information Retrieval challenges. In this work, we discuss the aspects of multimedia which makes information access challenging. An Example Pattern Recognition scenario is presented and the mathematical techniques that can be used to model uncertainty are also presented for developing a system that can sense, compute and communicate in a way that can make human life easy with smart objects assisting from around his surroundings., Comment: 8 pages, IJCSA, Vol 4, No.2,April 2014

We study the achievements of quantum circuits comprised of several one- and two-qubit gates. Quantum process matrices are determined for the basic one- and two-qubit gate operations and concatenated to yield the process matrix of the combined quantum circuit. Examples are given of process matrices obtained by a Monte Carlo wave function analysis of Rydberg blockade gates in neutral atoms. Our analysis is ideally suited to compare different implementations of the same process. In particular, we show that the three-qubit Toffoli gate facilitated by the simultaneous interaction between all atoms may be accomplished with higher fidelity than a concatenation of one- and two-qubit gates., Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures

We show that with adiabatic passage, one can reliably drive two-photon optical transitions between the ground states and interacting Rydberg states in a pair of atoms. For finite Rydberg interaction strengths a new adiabatic pathway towards the doubly Rydberg excited state is identified when a constant detuning is applied with respect to an intermediate optically excited level. The Rydberg interaction among the excited atoms provides a phase that may be used to implement quantum gate operations on atomic ground state qubits., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

We present a numerically efficient method for the characterisation of a quantum process subject to dissipation and noise. The master equation evolution of a maximally entangled state of the quantum system and a non-evolving ancilla system is simulated by Monte-Carlo wave-functions. We show how each stochastic state vectors provides quantities that are readily combined into an average process \chi-matrix. Our method significantly reduces the computational complexity in comparison with standard characterisation methods. It also readily provides an upper bound on the trace distance between the ideal and simulated process based on the evolution of only a single wave function of the entangled system., Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures

We propose a scheme for rapid generation of high fidelity steady state entanglement between a pair of atoms. A two-photon excitation process towards long-lived Rydberg states with finite pairwise interaction, a dark state interference effect in the individual atoms, and spontaneous emission from their short-lived excited states lead to rapid, dissipative formation of an entangled steady state. We show that for a wide range of physical parameters, this entangled state is formed on a time scale given by the strengths of coherent Raman and Rabi fields applied to the atoms, while it is only weakly dependent on the Rydberg interaction strength., Comment: 4 Pages, 3 figures + Supplementary Information [Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 033606]

The availability of large volumes of remote sensing data insists on higher degree of automation in feature extraction, making it a need of the hour.The huge quantum of data that needs to be processed entails accelerated processing to be enabled.GPUs, which were originally designed to provide efficient visualization, are being massively employed for computation intensive parallel processing environments. Image processing in general and hence automated feature extraction, is highly computation intensive, where performance improvements have a direct impact on societal needs. In this context, an algorithm has been formulated for automated feature extraction from a panchromatic or multispectral image based on image processing techniques. Two Laplacian of Guassian (LoG) masks were applied on the image individually followed by detection of zero crossing points and extracting the pixels based on their standard deviation with the surrounding pixels. The two extracted images with different LoG masks were combined together which resulted in an image with the extracted features and edges. Finally the user is at liberty to apply the image smoothing step depending on the noise content in the extracted image. The image is passed through a hybrid median filter to remove the salt and pepper noise from the image. This paper discusses the aforesaid algorithm for automated feature extraction, necessity of deployment of GPUs for the same; system-level challenges and quantifies the benefits of integrating GPUs in such environment. The results demonstrate that substantial enhancement in performance margin can be achieved with the best utilization of GPU resources and an efficient parallelization strategy. Performance results in comparison with the conventional computing scenario have provided a speedup of 20x, on realization of this parallelizing strategy.

Image fusion is the process of integrating multiple images of the same scene into a single fused image to reduce uncertainty and minimizing redundancy while extracting all the useful information from the source images. Image fusion process is required for different applications like medical imaging, remote sensing, medical imaging, machine vision, biometrics and military applications where quality and critical information is required. In this paper, image fusion using fuzzy and neuro fuzzy logic approaches utilized to fuse images from different sensors, in order to enhance visualization. The proposed work further explores comparison between fuzzy based image fusion and neuro fuzzy fusion technique along with quality evaluation indices for image fusion like image quality index, mutual information measure, fusion factor, fusion symmetry, fusion index, root mean square error, peak signal to noise ratio, entropy, correlation coefficient and spatial frequency. Experimental results obtained from fusion process prove that the use of the neuro fuzzy based image fusion approach shows better performance in first two test cases while in the third test case fuzzy based image fusion technique gives better results., Comment: (0975 8887). arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1209.4535 by other authors

We investigate the performance of Grover's quantum search algorithm on a register which is subject to loss of the particles that carry the qubit information. Under the assumption that the basic steps of the algorithm are applied correctly on the correspondingly shrinking register, we show that the algorithm converges to mixed states with 50% overlap with the target state in the bit positions still present. As an alternative to error correction, we present a procedure that combines the outcome of different trials of the algorithm to determine the solution to the full search problem. The procedure may be relevant for experiments where the algorithm is adapted as the loss of particles is registered, and for experiments with Rydberg blockade interactions among neutral atoms, where monitoring of the atom losses is not even necessary., Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures

We demonstrate through exact solutions that a spin bath leads to stronger (faster) dephasing of a qubit than a bosonic bath with identical bath-coupling spectrum. This difference is due to the spin-bath "dressing" by the coupling. Consequently, the quantum statistics of the bath strongly affects the pulse sequences required to dynamically decouple the qubit from its bath., Comment: 2 figures (submitted)

We demonstrate through an exactly solvable model that collective coupling to any thermal bath induces effectively nonlinear couplings in a quantum many-body (multi-spin) system. The resulting evolution can drive an uncorrelated large-spin system with high probability into a macroscopic quantum-superposition state. We discuss possible experimental realizations., Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, Physical Review Letters (in press)