An experimental investigation is performed on the interaction of intense femtosecond laser pulses at the intensity of 6 × 1017 W/cm2 (55 fs, 160 mJ at 800 nm) with ethane cluster (C2H6) N jets prepared under the backing pressure of 30 bars at room temperature (298 K). The experiment results indicate the generation of energetic protons, whose average and maximum kinetic energies are 12.2 and 138.1 keV, respectively, by Coulomb explosion of (C2H6) N clusters. (C2H6) N clusters of 5 nm in radius are generated in the experiment, which are 1.7 times larger than that of (CH4) N clusters prepared in the same conditions. Empirical estimation suggests that (C2H6) N clusters with radius of about 9.6 nm can be prepared at 80-bars backing pressure at 308 K. While (C2H6) N clusters of so large size are irradiated by sufficiently intense laser pulses, the average energy of protons will be increased up to 50 keV. It is inferred that such large-size deuterated ethane clusters (C2D6) N will favor more efficient neutron generation due to the significant increase of the D-D nuclear reaction cross section in laser-driven cluster nuclear fusion.
Nitrogen removal in wastewater treatment plants is usually severely inhibited under cold temperature. The present study proposes bioaugmentation using psychrotolerant heterotrophic nitrification-aerobic denitrification consortium to enhance nitrogen removal at low temperature. A functional consortium has been successfully enriched by stepped increase in DO concentration. Using this consortium, the specific removal rates of ammonia and nitrate at 10 degrees C reached as high as 3.1 mg N/(g SS h) and 9.6 mg N/ (g SS h), respectively. PCR-DGGE and clone library analysis both indicated a significant reduction in bacterial diversity during enrichment. Phylogenetic analysis based on nearly full-length 16S rRNA genes showed that Alphaproteobacteria. Deltaproteobacteria and particularly Bacteroidetes declined while Gammaproteobacteria (all clustered into Pseudomonas sp.) and Betaproteobacteria (mainly Rhodoferax ferrireducens) became dominant in the enriched consortium. It is likely that Pseudomonas spp. played a major role in nitrification and denitrification, while R. ferrireducens and its relatives utilized nitrate as both electron acceptor and nitrogen source. Crown Copyright (C) 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This letter presents a novel approach for visual saliency estimation through single image optimization. Instead of directly mapping visual features to saliency values with a unified model, we treat regional saliency values as the optimization objective on each single image. By using a quadratic programming framework, our approach can adaptively optimize the regional saliency values on each specific image to simultaneously meet multiple saliency hypotheses on visual rarity, center-bias and mutual correlation. Experimental results show that our approach can outperform 14 state-of-the-art approaches on a public image benchmark.