Japan - Table - Top Short Pulse Lasers

                      +---+
                      |(c)|
                      +---+
                      / +-------------------+
                 ||  /  |Buffer Gas         |
 +---+           || /   |-------------------|
 |   | -> e- ->  | -->  =  Plasma Channel   = -> Highly accelerated electron beam
 +---+           ||     |-------------------|
  (a)            ||     |                   |
                (b)     +-------------------+


(a) Particle Source
(b) Focusing Mirror
(c) Short Pulse Laser

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Spider Silk
   Material    Strength N/m^2   Energy to Break J/kg
  Dragline silk   1x10^9           1x10^5
  Kevlar          4x10^9           3x10^4
  Rubber          1x10^6           8x10^4
  Tendon          1x10^9           5x10^3

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Optical Rockets

An intense laser pulse modifies the index of refraction of the medium it travels in
producing a lens effect that focuses the beam to smaller diameters.
Known as self-focusing.  If the laser travels in a gas with an intensity high
enough to cause ionization, the plasma can modify the propagation of the light.


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Tunable Magnetic Phase Transition in High Tc Chromium Cyanide Thin Film

Molecular based ferrimagnetic thin films with high critical temperatures
composed of mixed valence chromium cyanides were synthesized by means of a simple 
electrochemical route.  The highest Tc was 270K for Cr2.12 (CN)6. The Tc
values were controlled by changing the preparation conditions.  A reversible
shift of Tc could be electrochemically induced.  As a result of such
electrochemical control, cyanides can be switched reversibly back and forth 
between ferrimagnetism and paramagnetism.  These magnets thus represent materials in which
magnetic properties are combined with eletrical functions.

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Achieving linear scaling for Electronic Quantum Coulomb Problem

The computation of electron-electron coulomb interation is one the limiting factors
in ab initio electronic structure calculations.  The computational requirements
for calculating the coulomb term with commonly used analytic integration techniques
between Gaussian functions prohibit electronic structure calculations of large 
molecules and other nanosystems.  Here , it is shown that a generalization of the fast 
multipole method to Gaussian charge distributions dramatically reduces the computational 
requirements of the electronic quantum Coulomb problem.  Benchmark calculations on 
graphitic sheets containing more than 400 atoms show near linear scaling together with high
speed and accuracy.
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Vibration-Rotation Tunneling Spectra of Water 
Pentamer : STructure and Dynamics

Far IR laser vibration-rotation tunneling spectroscopy was used to measure an intermolecular vibration
of the isolated water pentamer.  Rotational analysis supports
the chiral, slightly puckered ring structure predicted
by theory.  The experimentally deduced interoxygen separations for the water clusters up to the 
pentamer showed exponential convergence to the corresponding distance in 
bulk phase water 
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Analog Computational Power

H Siegelmann "Computation beyond the Turing limit"
the natural class of efficiently computable functions for analog computation is P/poly, so
that analog machines are potentially more powerful than conventional digital computers.  The 
class P/poly is the class of functions that a Turing machine can compute in polynomial time
with a polynomial amount of extra "advice."  The number of bits of advice must be 
polynomial in length of the input and may depend on this length, but not on the input itself.  
This class contains uncomputable functions such as the unary halting problem.  The suggestion in
Siegelmann's report is that a chaotic system Smale's horseshoe of the Baker's map can
obtain this extra advice and thus can compute the class P/poly.  In a chaotic system,
the extra advice is determined by the initial conditions, which one must presume are either 
determined by the computer programmer or are random.  If they are determined by the programmer,
the method for determining the advice could also presumable be used to supply it to a conventional 
computer.  If the initial conditions are random, one could replace it with a generator. 

--fin