Advances in developing ultrafast coherent sources operating at extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and x-ray wavelengths allow the extension of nonlinear optical techniques to shorter wavelengths. Here, we describe EUV transient grating spectroscopy, in which two crossed femtosecond EUV pulses produce spatially periodic nanoscale excitations in the sample and their dynamics is probed via diffraction of a third time-delayed EUV pulse. The use of radiation with wavelengths down to 13.3 nm allowed us to produce transient gratings with periods as short as 28 nm and observe thermal and coherent phonon dynamics in crystalline silicon and amorphous silicon nitride. This approach allows measurements of thermal transport on the ~10-nm scale, where the two samples show different heat transport regimes, and can be applied to study other phenomena showing nontrivial behaviors at the nanoscale, such as structural relaxations in complex liquids and ultrafast magnetic dynamics.
Residual stresses are well-known companions of all glassy materials. They affect and, in many cases, even strongly modify important material properties like the mechanical response and the optical transparency. The mechanisms through which stresses affect such properties are, in many cases, still under study, and their full understanding can pave the way to a full exploitation of stress as a primary control parameter. It is, for example, known that stresses promote particle mobility at small length scales, e.g., in colloidal glasses, gels, and metallic glasses, but this connection still remains essentially qualitative. Exploiting a preparation protocol that leads to colloidal glasses with an exceptionally directional built-in stress field, we characterize the stress-induced dynamics and show that it can be visualized as a collection of “flickering,” mobile regions with linear sizes of the order of ≈20 particle diameters (≈2 μm here) that move cooperatively, displaying an overall stationary but locally ballistic dynamics.
We use femtosecond extreme ultraviolet pulses derived from a free electron laser to excite and probe surface acoustic waves (SAWs) on the (001) surface of single crystal SrTiO3. SAWs are generated by a pair of 39.9 nm pulses crossed at the sample with the crossing angle defining the SAW wavelength at 84 nm. Detection of SAWs is performed via diffraction of a time-delayed 13.3 nm probe pulse by SAW-induced surface ripples. Despite the low reflectivity of the sample in the extreme ultraviolet range, the reflection mode detection is found to be efficient because of an increase in the diffraction efficiency for shorter wavelengths. We describe a methodology for extracting the SAW attenuation in the presence of a thermal grating, which is based on measuring the decay of oscillations at twice the SAW frequency. The proposed approach can be used to study ultrahigh frequency SAWs in a broad range of materials and will bridge the wave vector gap in surface phonon spectroscopy between Brillouin scattering and He atom scattering.
Abstract-In [5], a version of Relative Map Filter (RMF)is proposed to solve the simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) problem. In the RMF, the map states contain only quantities invariant under shift and rotation. The estimation of the map states and their correlations is carried out in an optimal way using the Kalman filter. However, the dependency among the map states is not taken into account, thus the resulting map states are inconsistent. This paper presents two methods to enforce the consistency of the relative map states. The idea is to maintain a geometrically consistent map by solving a set of constraints between the map states. Experimental results obtained by using the proposed methods on real platform data show better performance than those deduced from the original RMF.
Trajectory planning and tracking are crucial tasks in any application using robot manipulators. These tasks become particularly difficult when obstacles are present in the manipulator's workspace. In this paper it is assumed that the obstacles can be approximated in a conservative way with discs. The goal is to represent the obstacles in the robot configuration space, in order to allow an efficient and accurate trajectory planning and tracking. Moreover, the paper provides the methods for checking the collision between the n-joint manipulator and the obstacles. Trajectory planning depends on tracking accuracy. In this paper an adequate tracking accuracy is guaranteed assuming the use of a suitably designed robust controller.
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