Schizophrenia is a troubling and severe mental illness that is only incompletely treated by currently available drugs. New drug development is hindered by a scarcity of functionally relevant pharmacodynamic biomarkers that are translatable across preclinical and human subjects. Although psychosis is a major feature of schizophrenia, cognitive and negative symptoms determine the long-term functional outcomes for patients. Stimulus-evoked neural synchrony at gamma (~ 40 Hz) frequency plays an important role in the processing and integration of sensory information. Not surprisingly, schizophrenia patients show deficits in gamma oscillations. NMDA receptor (NMDAR) activation on fast-spiking parvalbumin-positive interneurons is deemed important for the generation of gamma oscillations. NMDA hypofunction has been proposed as an alternative hypothesis to the well-known dopamine dysregulation to explain the neurochemical abnormalities associated with schizophrenia. For this dissertation, we validated a preclinical model to pharmacologically probe NMDA-mediated gamma oscillations by further characterizing the auditory-steady state response (ASSR) in female Sprague Dawley rats. The ASSR is a measure of cortical neural synchrony evoked in response to periodic auditory stimuli. ASSR at 40 Hz is consistently disrupted in patients. First, we established the reliability of click train-evoked 40 Hz ASSR and tone-evoked gamma oscillations in 6 separate sessions, spread over a 3-week period. Then we established the sensitivity of these neural synchrony measures to acute NMDAR blockade using the high affinity NMDA channel blocker MK-801, using a repeated measures design. Next, we compared the reliability and sensitivity of the 40 Hz ASSR from two distinct recording sites. Results from this study showed that as compared to vertex, temporal recording showed a greater gamma synchrony. However, the temporal recording had poor test-retest reliability and lower sensitivity to MK-801-induced disruption. Lastly, we characterized the dose-response profiles of an NMDA co-agonist D-serine, an atypical (clozapine) and a typical (haloperidol) antipsychotic, on the 40 Hz ASSR. Results from these studies showed that only clozapine was effective in robustly augmenting 40 Hz ASSR. Furthermore, only clozapine pretreatment had partial protective effect against MK-801 induced ASSR disruption. Overall, this work establishes that vertex recorded 40 Hz ASSR is a reliable neural synchrony biomarker in female SD rats that is amenable for bidirectional pharmacodynamic modulation.

No description available.

It is common practice to perform accelerated aging with 60 Hz ac to determine the lifetime characteristics of insulation used in the machine. Comparable breakdown measurements are performed at different voltage levels and temperatures for the polyimide insulated machine winding under normal operating conditions of 60 Hz ac. The result shows that the time to failure can be represented by the inverse power law and the Arrhenius equation with respect to test voltage and temperature respectively. However, the use of power electronic devices causes harmonics, and spikes that electrically degrade the machine winding insulation. Applied high frequency pulse voltages can be used to study the impact of electrical degradation of the machine winding insulation that exists in electrical machines. Evaluation of change in dielectric strength, partial discharge and breakdown voltage is monitored versus aging caused by high frequency pulse voltage at 90% of operating temperature.

Acute mental fatigue can negatively affect cognitive performance This study investigates how different auditory interventions can influence the degree of mental fatigue during a cognitively demanding task, in this case, a 16-minute T-LoadDback test designed to induce mental fatigue. 27 healthy individuals were recruited and randomly assigned to one of three groups. One group listened to self-selected music, as it is well documented that listening to preferred music can increase dopamine levels, potentially mitigating mental fatigue. Another group listened to a 40 Hz binaural beat, known to improve concentration and increase energy. The third group served as a control group and conducted the task in silence. Subjective measurements of mental fatigue were obtained before and after the T-LoadDback test using a Visual Analog Scale for Fatigue(VAS-F), while objective data on mental fatigue were collected through the results of a 5-minute Corsi Block-tapping test and heart rate variability(HRV), both measured before and after the main task. The results indicated no significant pre-post differences for the VAS-F scores, Corsi test performance, or HRV, suggesting that mental fatigue was not successfully induced in the current experiment.The VAS-F scores showed no significant main effects or group differences, despite notable individual variations. Although both the music and 40 Hz groups outperformed the control group in the Corsi test, no differences were observed between the intervention groups themselves.  Similarly, HRV data showed no significant changes, indicating minimal effects on autonomic nervous system activity. These results suggest that while individual preferences in auditory stimuli, such as ambient music, might influence fatigue levels, the overall effectiveness of such interventions remains inconclusive.

The interferometric cantilever displacement detection in non-contact atomic force microscopy (NC-AFM) is in fundamental aspects explored and optimized. Furthermore, the opto-mechanical interaction of the light field with the cantilever is investigated in detail. Cantilevers are harmonic oscillators that are designed to have a high sensitivity for the detection of minute external forces typically originating from tip-sample interaction. In this work, however, the high sensitivity is used for detailed studies of opto-mechanical forces due to the radiation pressure of the light interacting with the cantilever. The interferometer in the NC-AFM setup consists of an optical cavity working similar to a Fabry-Pérot interferometer in combination with a reference interference arm working similar to a Michelson interferometer combining multi-beam interference with a reference beam resulting in a complex superposition of beams forming the interferometric intensity modulation signal. The character of the interferometer can be adjusted from predominant Michelson to predominant Fabry-Pérot characteristics by the optical loss inside the cavity. A systematic approach for accurate alignment, by using 3D intensity maps and intensity-over-distance curves, as well as the implications of deficient fiber-cantilever configurations are explored and the impact of the interferometer configuration on the detection system noise floor is investigated. A new physical property, namely, the Fabry-Perot enhancement factor is introduced that is a direct measure for the light intensity interacting with the cantilever compared to the reference beam intensity reflected back inside the fiber. The quantification of the optical loss yields an exact knowledge of the amount of light interacting with the cantilever that is crucial to understand opto-mechanical effects. The resulting opto-mechanical force varies sinusoidally during the course of one oscillation cycle. It is a key result of this work that the sinusoidal modification of the cantilever restoring force can be described analogue to the restoring force of a pendulum. This results in an observable amplitude dependent frequency shift of the cantilever oscillation, allowing a calculation of the ratio of the opto-mechanical force relative to the cantilever restoring force and thus allows an in-situ measurement of the cantilever stiffness with remarkable precision. Further investigation of the cantilever oscillation yields that other characteristic properties of the oscillation are significantly modified by the opto-mechanical interaction. The observed effective fundamental mode Q-factor drops significantly while the cantilever amplitude response to a certain excitation voltage increases. A discrete numerical model describing the cantilever as a 1D linear chain of mass points is implemented, yielding that the additional opto-mechanical force results in a partial pinning of the cantilever at the edges of the interferometric fringes. Pinning efficiently shifts energy from the fundamental mode to higher modes and modes of a pinned cantilever, resulting in a complex modal structure.

No description available.

Acoustics is the study of all sound waves, with ultrasound classified as those frequencies above 20,000 Hz. Currently, ultrasound is being used in many industries for a variety of purposes such as ultrasonic imaging, ultrasonic assisted friction stir welding, and ultrasonic spot welding. Despite these uses, the effects of ultrasound on phase stability and resultant mechanical properties has been minimally analyzed. Here we study the impact waves play in ultrasonic welding and design an apparatus to maximize waves entering aluminum alloy samples. Aluminum 2139 and 7050 are used because they are precipitation strengthened by metastable phases so temperature change, and the corresponding phase stability, can greatly impact their strength. Results suggest that the ultrasonic welder primarily imposes a localized temperature spike due to friction, averaging over 200°C in a few seconds, which generally lowers the Vickers hardness due to coarsening or even dissolution of strengthening precipitates. Conversely, the new design increases the Vickers hardness by up to 30% over the initial hardness of approximately 63HV for aluminum 2139 and 83HV for aluminum 7050, respectively, while only increasing the temperature by an average of approximately 10°C. This new design was unable to achieve peak hardness, but the strengthening it achieved in two minutes was equivalent to one month of natural aging. If this system was able to be fine-tuned, it could serve as a quick strengthening process for recently weakened aluminum alloys, such as after friction stir welding.

This master´s thesis is directed to an research of thermoelectric cells as power sources. It is discoursing about general properities of thermoelectric cells and their using at practical aplications in the first part. Then a heating and cooling system is designed and made for a selected type of thermoelectric cell which represents the emergency back-up power source. In the next part a DC/DC step-up converter is designed for a selected type of thermoelectric cell. This converter generates the DC load voltage 12V. The converter is controlled by PWM with a carrier frequency 50kHz.

<p>My thesis revolves around neuronal circuit dynamics in health and disease. The first part of the thesis characterized cross-regional synchrony within the visual cortical network following visual perceptual experience in healthy mice. This work for the first time described inter-areal 4-8 Hz superficial layer LFP synchrony across mouse visual cortical regions persisting beyond visual stimulation time window, and revealed that the synchrony was expressed specifically between V1 and the higher-order visual area (HVA) with functional preference matching the entrained spatial frequency (SF) and temporal frequency (TF) content, in mice. The discovery of visual familiarity induced inter-areal 4-8 Hz synchrony extends the previous discovery of the 4-8 Hz oscillation in V1 after visual experience from our lab (Kissinger et al., 2018; Kissinger et al., 2020; Gao et al., 2021), and provided the first pivotal evidence supporting the role of 4-8 Hz oscillation in mediating cross-regional communication. Such 4-8 Hz visual cortical network synchrony has been mostly reported in primate studies in contexts of visual attention and working memory (Liebe et al., 2012; Spyropoulos et al., 2018), while our study extended the visual cortical network synchrony research scope to mouse models and in a new context of visual familiarity. The work is a key step for starting cortical network studies in mice, and for starting predictive coding theory study in the context of oscillations in mouse cortical network in the future. Additionally, unit spiking was more strongly modulated by 4-8 Hz oscillations in V1 and HVAs after visual experience. The visually-locked responsive units in V1 and HVAs exihibted either increased or decreased inter-areal spiking synchrony, while most post-stimulus responsive units in V1 and HVA exhibited higher spiking synchrony. </p> <p>The other parts of my dissertation looked at V1 activity in disease and following a novel CNS therapy. One project looked at recovery of visually evoked response in mouse V1 after ischemia through NeuroD1 mediated astrocyte-to-neuron conversion, where we characterized the formation of cortical laminated structure from the converted neurons, longitudinal recovery of visually evoked responses of unit populations in V1, and units’ selective responses to orientations. Another project looked at altered visual cortical activity in an Auxilin knockout mouse model, which demonstrated overall reduced visually evoked responses, less selective responses to orientations, impaired visual adaptive responses and mismatch responses, as well as slower visual experience induced oscillations. These projects utilized the high-density silicon probe recording technique to 1) characterize visual cortical function recovery following a therapy, which provided evidence for its high efficacy for recovering physiological functions, and to 2) phenotype visual cortical functional impairments in a mouse disease model, which provided more basic understanding in visual cortical physiology of Auxilin related disease.</p> <p>In sum, my dissertation work took advantage of the high-density silicon probe recording technique to probe neuronal circuits in health and disease. The discovery of visual experience induced inter-areal 4-8 Hz synchrony paves the way for studying 4-8 Hz activity in relation to stream-dependent visual processing and predictive coding in health and disease.</p>

The thesis work was carried out within the Swedish Transport Agency's ERTMSproject to assist in deciding on the power supply of the facilities along the railways related to the project. This work applies to areas such as the implementation of the new rectifier, the Rectiverter, and power supply design with focus on redundancy and the overall electricity quality. The work was carried out by processing data from one week's power quality measurement at one of the signal plants where there was an installed Rectiverter. The results were set against current standards and causes of events discussed. The work indicates that the tested facility where power quality was measured meets the applicable standards. However, measures can be made to increase the efficiency of the facility, concerning both redundancy and direct power losses. This refers to the choice of power supply at facilities around the country and the conversion of AC to DC before the UPS and DC to AC-voltage after UPS to the Rectiverter. In chapter one terminology and abbreviations are listed. Chapter two contains an introduction to the report where background, purpose and objectives are formulated. Theory of power quality concepts, data processing, prevailing standards and information about the facilities of the Swedish Transport Administration can be found under chapter three. In chapter four, the methodology used for the power quality measurement and how it was carried out is presented. This includes the collection of sources, used equipment, practical set-up and used method for analysis. In chapter five, the results from the measurement are presented, which are then discussed further in the discussion (chapter six). The report is then summarized with conclusions and suggestions for further work in chapters seven and eight.