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We demonstrate a high-pressure, high-temperature sintering technique to form nitrogen-vacancy-nitrogen centres in nanodiamonds. Polycrystalline diamond nanoparticle precursors, with mean size of 25 nm, are produced by the shock wave from an explosion. These nanoparticles are sintered in the presence of ethanol, at a pressure of 7 GPa and temperature of 1300 °C, to produce substantially larger (3-4 times) diamond crystallites. The recorded spectral properties demonstrate the improved crystalline quality. The types of defects present are also observed to change; the characteristic spectral features of nitrogen-vacancy and silicon-vacancy centres present for the precursor material disappear. Two new characteristic features appear: (1) paramagnetic substitutional nitrogen (P1 centres with spin ½) with an electron paramagnetic resonance characteristic triplet hyperfine structure due to the I = 1 magnetic moment of the nitrogen nuclear spin and (2) the green spectral photoluminescence signature of the nitrogen-vacancy-nitrogen centres. This production method is a strong alternative to conventional high-energy particle beam irradiation. It can be used to easily produce purely green fluorescing nanodiamonds with advantageous properties for optical biolabelling applications.

This paper describes our analysis procedure for long-term tremor EMG recordings, as well as three examples of applications. The description of the method focuses on how characteristics of the tremor (e.g. frequency, intensity, agonist-antagonist interaction) can be defined and calculated based on surface EMG data. The resulting quantitative characteristics are called "tremor parameters." We discuss sinusoidally modulated, band-limited white noise as a model for pathological tremor-EMG, and show how the basic parameters can be extracted from this class of signals. The method is then applied to (1) estimate tremor severity in clinical studies, (2) quantify agonist-antagonist interaction, and (3) investigate the variations of the tremor parameters using simple methods from time-series analysis. (c) 1995 American Institute of Physics.

We have recently developed a method of long-term EMG recording (Bacher et al., 1989), which has proven suitable for the quantification of pathological tremor. In the present paper we show that (1) the principal parameters of the method (tremor occurrence, tremor intensity, tremor frequency) are highly reproducible with intraclass correlation coefficients in the order of 0.9, (2) that the method has both a high specificity (87.5%) and sensitivity (96%) for detection of pathological tremor, and (3) that it can be useful for examining agonist-antagonist muscle activation under everyday conditions.