We discuss laser cooling opportunities in atomic erbium, identifying five J ? J + 1 transitions from the 4f126s2 3H6 ground state that are accessible to common visible and near-infrared continuous-wave tunable lasers. We present lifetime measurements for the 4f11(4Io 15/2)5d5/26s2 (15/2, 5/2)7o state at 11888 cm-1 and the 4f11(4Io 13/2)5d3/26s2 (13/2, 5/2)7o state at 15847 cm-1, showing values of 20 +/- 4 micros and 5.6 +/- 1.4 micros, respectively. We also present a calculated value of 13 +/- 7 s-1 for the transition rate from the 4f11(4Io 15/2)5d3/26s2 (15/2, 3/2)7 o state at 7697 cm-1 to the ground state, based on scaled Hartree-Fock energy parameters. Laser cooling on these transitions in combination with a strong, fast (5.8 ns) laser cooling transition at 401 nm, suggest new opportunities for narrowband laser cooling of a large-magnetic moment atom, with possible applications in quantum information processing, high-precision atomic clocks, quantum degenerate gases, and deterministic single-atom doping of materials.

The magnetic properties of small diameter semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes have been recently predicted to depend sensitively on structural details that can be ignored for larger diameters. We confirm this dependence by directly measuring the magnetic alignment of several species of carbon nanotubes in aqueous suspension using polarized resonant photoluminescence. These data show evidence for asymmetry between nanotube chirality subclasses and are used to construct a model predicting nanotube magnetic responses for arbitrary semiconducting chirality.

. Significance: Time-domain functional near-infrared spectroscopy (TD-fNIRS) has been considered as the gold standard of noninvasive optical brain imaging devices. However, due to the high cost, complexity, and large form factor, it has not been as widely adopted as continuous wave NIRS systems. Aim: Kernel Flow is a TD-fNIRS system that has been designed to break through these limitations by maintaining the performance of a research grade TD-fNIRS system while integrating all of the components into a small modular device. Approach: The Kernel Flow modules are built around miniaturized laser drivers, custom integrated circuits, and specialized detectors. The modules can be assembled into a system with dense channel coverage over the entire head. Results: We show performance similar to benchtop systems with our miniaturized device as characterized by standardized tissue and optical phantom protocols for TD-fNIRS and human neuroscience results. Conclusions: The miniaturized design of the Kernel Flow system allows for broader applications of TD-fNIRS.

Imaging with a novel parallel-plate DOT breast imager that employs highly parallel, high-resolution CCD detection in the frequency-domain was demonstrated.

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Diffuse optical tomography (DOT) has been employed to derive spatial maps of physiologically important chromophores in the human breast, but the fidelity of these images is often compromised by boundary effects such as those due to the chest wall. We explore the image quality in fast, data-intensive analytic and algebraic linear DOT reconstructions of phantoms with subcentimeter target features and large absorptive regions mimicking the chest wall. Experiments demonstrate that the chest wall phantom can introduce severe image artifacts. We then show how these artifacts can be mitigated by exclusion of data affected by the chest wall. We also introduce and demonstrate a linear algebraic reconstruction method well suited for very large data sets in the presence of a chest wall.

In this paper, we describe a novel clinical breast diffuse optical tomography (DOT) instrument for CW and RF data acquisition in transmission geometry. It is designed to be able to acquire a massive amount of data in a short amount of time available for patient measurement by using a 209-channel galvo-based fast optical switch and a fast electron-multiplying CCD. In addition to CW measurements, RF measurements were made by using an electro-optic modulator for source modulation and a gain-modulated image intensifier for detection. The patient bed has many clinically-oriented features as well as improved data acquisition rate and transmission RF measurement capability. A series of preliminary results will be shown, including a heterodyne RF experiment for bulk property measurement and a CW experiment for 3D imaging. In order to deal with large data size, a linear reconstruction algorithm that exploits separability of the inverse problem in Fourier domain is used for fast and memory-load-free reconstruction.

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