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Current and future high contrast imaging instruments aim to detect exoplanets at closer orbital separations, lower masses, and/or older ages than their predecessors, with the eventual goal of directly detecting terrestrial-mass habitable-zone exoplanets. However, continually evolving speckles in the coronagraphic science image still limit state-of-the-art ground-based exoplanet imaging instruments to contrasts at least two orders of magnitude worse than what is needed to achieve this goal. For ground-based adaptive optics (AO) instruments it remains challenging for most speckle suppression techniques to attenuate both the dynamic atmospheric and quasi-static instrumental speckles. We have proposed a focal plane wavefront sensing and control algorithm to address this challenge, called the Fast Atmospheric Self-coherent camera (SCC) Technique (FAST), which enables the SCC to operate down to millisecond timescales even when only a few photons are detected per speckle. Here we present preliminary experimental results of FAST on the Santa Cruz Extreme AO Laboratory (SEAL) testbed. In particular, we illustrate the benefit "second stage" AO-based focal plane wavefront control, demonstrating FAST closed-loop compensation of evolving residual atmospheric turbulence on millisecond-timescales., Comment: submitted proceedings to SPIE SPIE Optical Engineering + Applications 2021, Techniques and Instrumentation for Detection of Exoplanets X

Magnetic resonance (MR) imaging offers a wide variety of imaging techniques. A large amount of data is created per examination which needs to be checked for sufficient quality in order to derive a meaningful diagnosis. This is a manual process and therefore time- and cost-intensive. Any imaging artifacts originating from scanner hardware, signal processing or induced by the patient may reduce the image quality and complicate the diagnosis or any image post-processing. Therefore, the assessment or the ensurance of sufficient image quality in an automated manner is of high interest. Usually no reference image is available or difficult to define. Therefore, classical reference-based approaches are not applicable. Model observers mimicking the human observers (HO) can assist in this task. Thus, we propose a new machine-learning-based reference-free MR image quality assessment framework which is trained on HO-derived labels to assess MR image quality immediately after each acquisition. We include the concept of active learning and present an efficient blinded reading platform to reduce the effort in the HO labeling procedure. Derived image features and the applied classifiers (support-vector-machine, deep neural network) are investigated for a cohort of 250 patients. The MR image quality assessment framework can achieve a high test accuracy of 93.7$\%$ for estimating quality classes on a 5-point Likert-scale. The proposed MR image quality assessment framework is able to provide an accurate and efficient quality estimation which can be used as a prospective quality assurance including automatic acquisition adaptation or guided MR scanner operation, and/or as a retrospective quality assessment including support of diagnostic decisions or quality control in cohort studies.

We investigate magnonic band structure in thin homogeneous permalloy film decorated with periodic array of elliptically shaped permalloy dots and separated by non-magnetic Pt spacer. We demonstrated experimentally formation of the magnonic band structure for Damon-Eshbach wave propagating in permalloy film with the band gap opened at the Brillouin zone border and band splitting at smaller wavenumbers, due to the Bragg interference and interaction of propagating wave of the continuous film with a standing resonant mode of the nano-ellipses, respectively. The shape anisotropy of the permalloy nanodots allows to control the spin wave dynamics through the switch between two states of the magnetization with respect to the underneath film magnetization, thus enabling magnonic band structure reprogrammability. With numerical analysis we show, that predominant role in formation of the magnonic band structure is played by a vertical dynamic coupling between propagating wave in the film and magnetization oscillations in the nanodots., Comment: 7 pages, 8 figures

The success of models of coupled two-leg spin ladders in describing the magnetic excitation spectrum of La_{2-x}Ba_xCuO_4 had been interpreted previously as evidence for bond-centered stripes. In a recent article, however, we have determined the magnetic coupling induced by the charge stripes between bond- or site-centered spin stripes modeled by two- or three-leg ladders, respectively. We found that only the site-centered models order. We further indicated excellent agreement of a fully consistent analysis of coupled three-leg ladders using a spin wave theory of bond with the experimental data. Here, we provide a full and detailed account of this analysis., Comment: 19 pages, 17 figures

The success of models of coupled two-leg spin ladders in describing the magnetic excitation spectrum of La_[2-x]Ba_xCuO_4 has been widely interpreted as evidence for bond-centered stripes. Here, we determine the magnetic coupling induced by the charge stripes between bond- or site-centered spin stripes modeled by two- or three-leg ladders, respectively. We find that only the site-centered models order. We further report excellent agreement of a fully consistent analysis of coupled three-leg ladders using a spin wave theory of bond operators with the experiment., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures

We apply the functional renormalization group (FRG) method to calculate the conductance of a quantum dot in the Kondo regime. Starting from the exact FRG equations in Keldysh formulation for the Kondo exchange Hamiltonian in pseudo-fermion (pf) representation, we solve the coupled equations for the pf self energy and the coupling function, neglecting three-particle and higher correlation functions. The conductance $G$ as a function of temperature $T$ and bias voltage $V$ is calculated using a renormalized Golden Rule expression. The limiting behavior at $T$ and/or $V$ $\gg T_{K}$ ($T_{K}$ : Kondo temperature) agrees with known results. The difficulties when approaching strong coupling are analyzed and improvements are suggested., Comment: accepted for publication in Ann. Phys. (Berlin)

We compare four different methods to calculate radiative transfer through a magnetized stellar atmosphere, and apply them to the case of magnetic white dwarfs. All methods are numerically stable enough to allow determination of the magnetic field structure, but distinctions between faster, simplifying, methods, and elaborate, but more CPU-time consuming, methods, can be made., Comment: 4 pages