Main objective of this thesis is to generate and amplify few cycle pulses in the infrared region. In this thesis, two approaches were introduced for few cycle pulse parametric amplification at 800 nm and 1.5 μm. First approach is dedicated for prospects for increasing average power of OPCPA via multi-beam pumping; the second approach is dedicated for generation of carrier-envelope-phase (CEP) stable high energy (up to tens of millijoules) few-cycle pulses at 1.5 μm. An experimental investigation of two or three beams-pumped OPCPA system based on type I BBO crystal is presented. The 2nd OPA stage was pumped by two or three pump beams derived from independent Nd:YAG laser amplifiers. The efficiency of interaction was shown to be comparable to that of single-beam pumped OPA and diminishes only slightly due to cascaded parametric diffraction of interacting waves. The effect was observed and its impact on efficiency of parametric amplification process was shown to decrease at larger intersecting angles of pump. In the prospect, the use of multiple lasers for OPA pumping has an appeal for increasing the repetition rate and consequently the average power of an ultrashort pulse laser system. Finally, the concept and realization of hybrid system based on type II KTP OPCPA and filamentation are described. A CEP-stable 1.5 μm OPCPA system with pulse energies up to 12.5 mJ after 4 OPA stages is demonstrated. Furthermore, self-compression of CEP-stable 2.2 mJ, 74.4 fs, 1.57 μm input... [to full text] / Disertacijos darbo tikslas – suformuoti ir parametriškai stiprinti kelių optinių ciklų trukmės impulsus infraraudonojoje srityje Šioje disertacijoje buvo tirtos dvi moduliuotosios fazės („čirpuotų“) impulsų parametrinio stiprinimo sistemos, stiprinančios ypač plataus spektro impulsus 800 nm bei 1,5 μm srityse. Pirmoji sistema skirta tirti galimybę didinti lazerinės spinduliuotės vidutinę galią keliais pluoštais kaupinamame parametriniame stiprintuve; antroji sistema skirta kelių optinių ciklų trukmės stabilios fazės impulsų formavimui 1,5 μm srityje. Disertacijoje aprašomas I tipo parametrinis stiprintuvas, kurio 2-oji pakopa buvo kaupinama dviem arba trimis nepriklausomų lazerinių šaltinių pluoštais. Nustatyta, kad parametrinį stiprintuvą kaupinant keliais pluoštais stebimas naujų erdvinių komponentų atsiradimas, kuriuos sąlygoja parametrinė pakopinė difrakcija, o tai mažina bendrą sistemos energetinio keitimo efektyvumą.. Darbo metu pademonstruota galimybė mažinti parametrinės difrakcijos sąlygotus nuostolius parametriniame stiprintuve derinant kampus tarp kaupinimo pluoštų. Taip pat pristatomas alternatyvus būdas formuoti didelės energijos (kelių dešimčių milidžaulių) kelių optinių ciklų trukmės stabilios fazės impulsus 1,5 μm srityje. Būdas paremtas sąlyginai siauro spektro 1,5 μm srityje stiprinimu II tipo KTP kristale bei spektro plėtra inertinėse dujose po stiprinimo. 4 pakopų parametriniame stiprintuve pasiekta iki šiol didžiausia 12,5 mJ impulso energija 1,5 μm... [toliau žr. visą tekstą]

Disertacijos darbo tikslas – suformuoti ir parametriškai stiprinti kelių optinių ciklų trukmės impulsus infraraudonojoje srityje Šioje disertacijoje buvo tirtos dvi moduliuotosios fazės („čirpuotų“) impulsų parametrinio stiprinimo sistemos, stiprinančios ypač plataus spektro impulsus 800 nm bei 1,5 μm srityse. Pirmoji sistema skirta tirti galimybę didinti lazerinės spinduliuotės vidutinę galią keliais pluoštais kaupinamame parametriniame stiprintuve; antroji sistema skirta kelių optinių ciklų trukmės stabilios fazės impulsų formavimui 1,5 μm srityje. Disertacijoje aprašomas I tipo parametrinis stiprintuvas, kurio 2-oji pakopa buvo kaupinama dviem arba trimis nepriklausomų lazerinių šaltinių pluoštais. Nustatyta, kad parametrinį stiprintuvą kaupinant keliais pluoštais stebimas naujų erdvinių komponentų atsiradimas, kuriuos sąlygoja parametrinė pakopinė difrakcija, o tai mažina bendrą sistemos energetinio keitimo efektyvumą.. Darbo metu pademonstruota galimybė mažinti parametrinės difrakcijos sąlygotus nuostolius parametriniame stiprintuve derinant kampus tarp kaupinimo pluoštų. Taip pat pristatomas alternatyvus būdas formuoti didelės energijos (kelių dešimčių milidžaulių) kelių optinių ciklų trukmės stabilios fazės impulsus 1,5 μm srityje. Būdas paremtas sąlyginai siauro spektro 1,5 μm srityje stiprinimu II tipo KTP kristale bei spektro plėtra inertinėse dujose po stiprinimo. 4 pakopų parametriniame stiprintuve pasiekta iki šiol didžiausia 12,5 mJ impulso energija 1,5 μm... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / Main objective of this thesis is to generate and amplify few cycle pulses in the infrared region. In this thesis, two approaches were introduced for few cycle pulse parametric amplification at 800 nm and 1.5 μm. First approach is dedicated for prospects for increasing average power of OPCPA via multi-beam pumping; the second approach is dedicated for generation of carrier-envelope-phase (CEP) stable high energy (up to tens of millijoules) few-cycle pulses at 1.5 μm. An experimental investigation of two or three beams-pumped OPCPA system based on type I BBO crystal is presented. The 2nd OPA stage was pumped by two or three pump beams derived from independent Nd:YAG laser amplifiers. The efficiency of interaction was shown to be comparable to that of single-beam pumped OPA and diminishes only slightly due to cascaded parametric diffraction of interacting waves. The effect was observed and its impact on efficiency of parametric amplification process was shown to decrease at larger intersecting angles of pump. In the prospect, the use of multiple lasers for OPA pumping has an appeal for increasing the repetition rate and consequently the average power of an ultrashort pulse laser system. Finally, the concept and realization of hybrid system based on type II KTP OPCPA and filamentation are described. A CEP-stable 1.5 μm OPCPA system with pulse energies up to 12.5 mJ after 4 OPA stages is demonstrated. Furthermore, self-compression of CEP-stable 2.2 mJ, 74.4 fs, 1.57 μm input... [to full text]

Bound state systems consisting of three nonrelativistic particles are numerically studied. Calculations are performed employing two-body and three-body forces as input in the Hamiltonian in order to study the role or contribution of three-body forces to the binding in these systems. The resulting differential Faddeev equations are solved as three-dimensional equations in the two Jacobi coordinates and the angle between them, as opposed to the usual partial wave expansion approach. By expanding the wave function as a sum of the products of spline functions in each of the three coordinates, and using the orthogonal collocation procedure, the equations are transformed into an eigenvalue problem. The matrices in the aforementioned eigenvalue equations are generally of large order. In order to solve these matrix equations with modest and optimal computer memory and storage, we employ the iterative Restarted Arnoldi Algorithm in conjunction with the so-called tensor trick method. Furthermore, we incorporate a polynomial accelerator in the algorithm to obtain rapid convergence. We applied the method to obtain the binding energies of Triton, Carbon-12, and Ozone molecule. / Physics / M.Sc (Physics)

Na análise de estruturas é comum a consideração da concentricidade entre vigas e placas. Estudos numéricos em pavimentos de laje nervurada, onde os espaçamentos das vigas são pequenos, mostram que a consideração da excentricidade entre placa e a viga resultam em redução dos deslocamentos na estrutura, entretanto não existem estudos sobre a influência da excentricidade em pavimentos com poucas vigas. Este trabalho apresenta a análise numérica de pavimentos com dimensões usuais considerando ou não a excentricidade com o objetivo de verificar a influência da excentricidade no comportamento da estrutura. As análises mostraram diferenças de deslocamentos e tensões nas estruturas estudadas. O efeito de excentricidade pode ser incluído através da modificação da matriz de rigidez do elemento finito de viga. Todos os pavimentos foram analisados com o software ANSYS com elementos de placa e viga que representassem os modelos do trabalho. / It\'s usual practice on structural analysis of buildings slabs to assume the concentricity between plates and beams. Numerical studies in waffle-slabs, where the distance between beams is small, showed that the eccentricity of beam to plate results in reduction of stresses and displacements of the system, however there is not similar study about the influence of eccentricity in slabs with few beams. This work presents numerical analysis results of at slabs with usual dimensions considering or not plate-beam eccentricity, aiming at evaluating its influence in structural behavior. The analysis showed differences of displacements and stress in studied structures. The effects of eccentricity can be included by modifying the stiffness matrix of the beam finite element. All slabs were analyzed with ANSYS program with suitable beam and plate elements.

We have deposited bulk, monolayer and few-layers as well as large-scale 2D layered MoS2 thin films by pulsed DC magnetron sputtering from an MoS2 target. MoS2 has gained great attention lately, together with other layered Transition Metal Dichalcogenides (TMDCs), for its unique optical and electrical properties with thickness-dependent bandgap. MoS2 also transitions from an indirect to a direct bandgap when thinned down to monolayer. This is intriguing in the fabrication of novel solar cells and photodetectors. Sputter-deposition has the advantage of producing large-scale, high-quality films, which is paramount for layered MoS2 to be applicable on an industrial level. The quality in terms of crystallinity and c⊥-texture of sputtered bulk MoS2 was evaluated as a function of several deposition process parameters: process pressure, substrate temperature and H2S-to-Ar ratio. X-ray Diffraction (XRD) results revealed that the high substrate temperature of 700 °C together with reactive H2S process gas improved the quality regardless of pressure. However, the quality was slightly improved further with increasing pressure up to 50 mTorr. We also found that the quality improved with increasing temperature up to 700 °C using pure Ar as the process gas. Rutherford Backscattering Spectrometry (RBS) analysis showed that with the addition of H2S the stoichiometry of MoSx improved from MoS1.78 using pure Ar to fully stoichiometric MoS2.01 at 40% H2S in the H2S/Ar mixture. Cross-sectional Transmission Electron Microscopy (TEM) imaging revealed the high-quality 2D layered structure of the MoS2 films and a maximum thickness of 5 nm of c⊥-growth MoS2 before the onset of the undesirable c∥-growth. These results provide a solution with respect to the ongoing challenge of obtaining high quality and good stoichiometry of sputtered TMDC films at elevated temperatures. Formation of monolayer and few-layers MoS2 was confirmed by Raman and Photoluminescence (PL) spectroscopy. The peak separation of the E12g and A1g Raman-active modes for MoS2 monolayer was measured to 19.3 cm-1 on SiO2/Si, increases substantially in the transition to bilayer MoS2 and exhibits bulk values from four layers MoS2 and above. This result serves as a good indicator of monolayer as well as few-layers MoS2 formation. The monolayer film exhibits a strong photoluminescence peak at 1.88 eV owing to its direct optical bandgap, as compared to the indirect one of bilayer and thicker films. X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS) spectra of the monolayer MoSx film indicate successful sulfurization of the molybdenum atoms and absence of residual sulfur. XPS also showed ideal stoichiometric MoS2.03 ± 0.03 of the monolayer film. Furthermore, a uniform MoS2 monolayer was successfully grown on a 4" SiO2/Si wafer, demonstrating the large-scale uniformity that can be achieved by sputter-deposition, making it highly applicable on an industrial level.

Where there has been a steady development of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) techniques for printed documents, the instruments that provide good quality for hand-written manuscripts by Hand-written Text Recognition  methods (HTR) and transcriptions are still some steps behind. With the main focus on historical ciphers (i.e. encrypted documents from the past with various types of symbol sets), this thesis examines the performance of two machine learning architectures developed within the DECRYPT project framework, a clustering based unsupervised algorithm and a semi-supervised few-shot deep-learning model. Both models are tested on seen and unseen scribes to evaluate the difference in performance and the shortcomings of the two architectures, with the secondary goal of determining the influences of the datasets on the performance. An in-depth analysis of the transcription results is performed with particular focus on the Alchemic and Zodiac symbol sets, with analysis of the model performance relative to character shape and size. The results show the promising performance of Few-Shot architectures when compared to Clustering algorithm, with a respective SER average of 0.336 (0.15 and 0.104 on seen data / 0.754 on unseen data) and 0.596 (0.638 and 0.350 on seen data / 0.8 on unseen data).

<div>Supervised classification methods based on deep learning have achieved great success in many domains and tasks that are previously unimaginable. Such approaches build on learning paradigms that require hundreds of examples in order to learn to classify objects or events. Thus, their immediate application to the domains with few or no observations is limited. This is because of the lack of ability to rapidly generalize to new categories from a few examples or from high-level descriptions of categories. This can be attributed to the significant gap between the way machines represent knowledge and the way humans represent categories in their minds and learn to recognize them. In this context, this research represents categories as semantic trees in a high-level attribute space and proposes an approach to utilize these representations to conduct N-Shot, Few-Shot, One-Shot, and Zero-Shot Learning (ZSL). This work refers to this paradigm as the problem of general classification (GCP) and proposes a unified framework for GCP referred to as the Few and Zero-Shot Technique (FAZT). FAZT framework is an end-to-end approach that uses trainable 3D convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks to simultaneously optimize for both the semantic and the classification tasks. Lastly, the problem of systematically obtaining semantic attributes by utilizing domain-specific ontologies is presented. The proposed framework is validated in the domains of hand gesture and action/activity recognition, however, this research can be applied to other domains such as video understanding, the study of human behavior, emotion recognition, etc. First, an attribute-based dataset for gestures is developed in a systematic manner by relying on literature in gestures and semantics, and crowdsourced platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ZSL dataset for hand gestures (ZSGL dataset). Next, our framework is evaluated in two experimental conditions: 1. Within-category (to test the attribute recognition power) and 2. Across-category (to test the ability to recognize an unknown category). In addition, we conducted experiments in zero-shot, one-shot, few-shot and continuous learning conditions in both open-set and closed-set scenarios. Results showed that our framework performs favorably on the ZSGL, Kinetics, UIUC Action, UCF101 and HMDB51 action datasets in all the experimental conditions.<br></div><div><br></div>

Depuis une vingtaine d’années, la physique attoseconde, via le phénomène de génération d’harmoniques d’ordres élevés (HHG), a permis de nombreuses avancées dans la compréhension des phénomènes de dynamique ultra-rapide. Les lasers femtoseconde émettant des impulsions de fortes énergies et de durées de quelques cycles optiques sont les outils indispensables à cette physique. De plus, la phase entre la porteuse et l’enveloppe (CEP) des impulsions doit être contrôlée. Récemment les lasers basés sur les fibres dopées ytterbium ont permis de transposer les expériences d’HHG à haute cadence. La stabilisation de la CEP pour ce type de systèmes constitue la brique manquante au développement de sources à haute cadence pleinement compatibles avec ces applications. Cette thèse a été consacrée à la stabilisation CEP d’un laser à fibre dopée ytterbium pour une application à la génération de rayonnement cohérent dans l’XUV à fort flux de photon. Dans la première partie nous présentons l’architecture d’une source à un taux de répétition de 100 kHz stable en CEP émettant des impulsions de 30 microjoules et 96 fs. Ce système constitue une preuve de principe pour les futures sources haute énergie. La stabilisation de CEP est assurée par une architecture hybride composée d’un injecteur stabilisé passivement suivi d’un amplificateur de puissance stabilisé activement. Un bruit résiduel de CEP inférieur à 400 mrad est obtenu dans différentes configurations, de la mesure courte durée (1 s) tir à tir jusqu’à la mesure sur une heure de fonctionnement. Dans la seconde partie nous présentons la mise au point d’une ligne HHG XUV optimisée à 13 nm sur les paramètres d’un laser à fibre, pour des applications à l’imagerie par diffraction cohérente. / In the last two decades, attosecond physics, based on the high harmonic generation (HHG) phenomenon, has allowed a better understanding of ultrafast dynamics in the microcosm. High-energy few-cycles carrier-envelope phase (CEP) stabilized sources are the main enabling tools for this physics. Recently, temporally compressed Ytterbium-doped fiber amplifiers have been successfully used as high XUV photon flux HHG drivers. CEP stabilization of these sources would ensure their full compatibility with attoscience. The thesis is devoted to the CEP stabilization of a high repetition rate Yb-doped fiber femtosecond source, for high XUV photon flux beamline applications. In the first part, we present the architecture of such a source at 100 kHz repetition rate delivering 30 microjoules 96 fs CEP-stable pulses. It constitutes a test bench for future energy-scaled few-cycle sources. The CEP stabilization is ensured in a hybrid architecture including a passively stabilized frontend followed by an actively stabilized power amplifier. A residual CEP noise <400 mrad is measured using various setups, including a shot-to-shot measurement over 1 s and a long-term stability over 1 h. In the second part, we discuss the design of a high flux HHG beamline optimized for a future generation of fiber-based driver at 13 nm for applications to coherent diffraction imaging.

Intense few-cycle laser pulses can significantly affect the properties of transparent solids during the interaction. These processes take place on femtosecond time scales and they can be studied using ultrafast spectroscopic methods. This dissertation deals with highly nonlinear processes in diamond. In the interaction with a crystalline diamond, we observed a strong nonlinear broadening of the spectrum due to self-phase modulation effect, which allowed us to create a simple technique for compression of pulses from laser oscillator. At the same time, strongly nonlinear five-photon absorption was observed, in which we found a significant anisotropy and dependence on the polarization state. With two-beam pump and probe experiments we present a study of anharmonic phenomena in the dynamics of coherent phonons in diamond, additionally we created a new detection technique of lattice vibrations using multiphoton absorption. Finally, the high time resolution of the experiments revealed that the sub-picosecond electron dynamics strongly depends on the composition and morphology of the polycrystalline diamond thin films. The experimental results of this work provide comprehensive research into the interaction of diamond with few-cycle laser pulses and the development of new spectroscopic methods.

Voice user interfaces have been growing in popularity and with them an interest for open vocabulary keyword spotting. In this thesis we focus on one particular approach to open vocabulary keyword spotting, query by example keyword spotting. Three types of query by example keyword spotting approaches are described and evaluated: sequence distances, speech to phonemes and deep distance learning. Evaluation is done on a series of custom tasks designed to measure a variety of aspects. The Google Speech Commands benchmark is used for evaluation as well, this to make it more comparable to existing works. From the results, the deep distance learning approach seem most promising in most environments except when memory is very constrained; in which sequence distances might be considered. The speech to phonemes methods is lacking in the usability evaluation. / Röstgränssnitt har växt i populäritet och med dem ett intresse för öppenvokabulärnyckelordsigenkänning. I den här uppsatsen fokuserar vi på en specifik form av öppenvokabulärnyckelordsigenkänning, den s.k nyckelordsigenkänning- genom- exempel. Tre typer av nyckelordsigenkänning- genom- exempel metoder beskrivs och utvärderas: sekvensavstånd, tal till fonem samt djupavståndsinlärning. Utvärdering görs på konstruerade uppgifter designade att mäta en mängd olika aspekter hos metoderna. Google Speech Commands data används för utvärderingen också, detta för att göra det mer jämförbart mot existerade arbeten. Från resultaten framgår det att djupavståndsinlärning verkar mest lovande förutom i miljöer där resurser är väldigt begränsade; i dessa kan sekvensavstånd vara av intresse. Tal till fonem metoderna visar brister i användningsuvärderingen.