We have investigated the temperature dependence of elastic modulus for various ferroelectric ceramics in the temperature range of 20–90°C.The Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3(NBT)ceramics has a phase transition at 200°C,thus exhibits minimal change in elastic modulus up to 90°C,while the elastic modulus of the BaZr0.07Ti0.93O3(BZT-7)shows 12.5%change at the phase transition temperature of70°C and that of the BaZr0.15Ti0.85O3(BZT-15)ceramics shows 34.6%change at the phase transition temperature of60°C.The variations of elastic modulus will affect the temperature stability of devices made by these lead-free ferroelectric ceramics.
The speed-of-sound variance will decrease the imaging quality of photoacoustic tomography in acoustically inhomogeneous tissue. In this study, ultrasound computed tomography is combined with photoacoustic tomography to enhance the photoacoustic tomography in this situation. The speed-of-sound information is recovered by ultrasound computed tomography. Then, an improved delay-and-sum method is used to reconstruct the image from the photoacoustic signals. The simulation results validate that the proposed method can obtain a better photoacoustic tomography than the conventional method when the speed-of-sound variance is increased. In addition, the influences of the speed-of-sound variance and the fan-angle on the image quality are quantitatively explored to optimize the image scheme. The proposed method has a good performance even when the speed-of-sound variance reaches 14.2%. Furthermore, an optimized fan angle is revealed,which can keep the good image quality with a low cost of hardware. This study has a potential value in extending the biomedical application of photoacoustic tomography.
We design a planar metasurface to modulate the wavefront of a water surface wave(WSW) on a deep sub-wavelength scale. The metasurface is composed of an array of coiling-up-space units with specially designed parameters, and can take on the work of steering the wavefront when it is pierced into water. Like their acoustic counterparts, the modulation of WSW is ascribed to the gradient phase shift of the coiling-up-space units, which can be perfectly tuned by changing the coiling plate length and channel number inside the units. According to the generalized Snell's law, negative refraction and ‘driven' surface mode of WSW are also demonstrated at certain incidences. Specially, the transmitted WSW could be efficiently guided out by linking a symmetrically-corrugated channel in ‘driven' surface mode. This work may have potential applications in water wave energy extraction and coastal protection.
The electric field enhancement properties of an active gold nanoshell with gain material inside have been investigated by using Mie theory. As the gain coefficient of the inner core increases to a critical value, a super-resonance appears in the active gold nanoshell, and enormous enhancements of the electric fields can be found near the surface of the particle. With increasing shell thickness, the critical value of the gain coefficient for the super-resonance of the active gold nanoshell first decreases and then increases, and the corresponding surface enhanced Raman scattering(SERS) enhancement factor(G factor) also first increases and then decreases. The optimized active gold nanoshell can be obtained with an extremely high SERS G factor of the order of 1019–1020. Such an optimized active gold nanoshell possesses a high-efficiency SERS effect and may be useful for single-molecule detection.
We study the influence of limited-view scanning on the depth imaging of photoacoustic tomography.The situation,in which absorbers are located at different depths with respect to the limited-view scanning trajectory,is called depth imaging and is investigated in this paper.The results show that limited-view scanning causes the reconstructed intensity of deep absorbers to be weaker than that of shallow ones and that deep absorbers will be invisible if the scanning range is too small.The concept of effective scanning angle is proposed to analyse that phenomenon.We find that an effective scanning angle can well predict the relationship between scanning angle and the intensity ratio of absorbers.In addition,limited-view scanning is employed to improve image quality.
Photoacoustic imaging(PAI),as an emerging biomedicine diagnostic technique that has been developed quickly in the past decade,inherits the high spatial resolution of ultrasonography in imaging deep tissue and the high sensitivity of optical imaging in evaluating tissue chemical and physiological information.In this paper,after introducing the basic principles of PAI including both photoacoustic tomography and photoacoustic microscopy,we will review some recent progress of PAI in biomedicine and demonstrate the capability of PAI in detecting the chemical compositions and in evaluating the histological microstructures in biological tissue.
Fano resonances in the symmetry-broken gold-SiO2-gold(BGSG)nanotubes and the associated dimers have been investigated based on the finite element method.In the BGSG nanotube,the symmetry breaking induced the interactions of the inner gold core and outer gold nanoshell plasmons of all multipolar orders and hence the red-shifts of the plasmon resonance modes and the enhanced quadrupole mode peaks were observed.The interference of the quadrupole mode peak with the subradiant dipole mode caused a Fano-dip in the scattering spectrum.By increasing the core offset-value in the BGSG nanotube,the Fano dip with low energy showed a red-shift and became deeper.Unexpectedly the plasmon coupling between a GSG nanotube and a BGSG nanotube can lead to two strong Fano dips in the scattering spectra of the dimer.It was further noted that the thin side of the BGSG nanotube located at two sides of the dimer gap can lead to the strong near-field coupling between two BGSG nanotubes and hence a deeper and broader Fano dip.
