Sexual Orientation Across Porn Use, Sexual Fantasy, and In-Person Sexuality: Visualizing Branchedness and Coincidence via Sexual Configurations Theory.

Sexual orientation describes sexual interests, approaches, arousals, and attractions. People experience these interests and attractions in a number of contexts, including in-person sexuality, fantasy, and porn use, among others. The extent to which sexual orientation is divergent (branched) and/or overlapping (coincident) across these, however, is unclear. In the present study, a gender/sex and sexually diverse sample (N = 30; 15 gender/sex/ual minorities and 15 majorities) manipulated digital circles representing porn use, in-person sexuality, and fantasy on a tablet during in-person interviews. Participants used circle overlap to represent the degree of shared sexual interests across contexts and circle size to indicate the strength and/or number of sexual interests within contexts. Across multiple dimensions of sexual orientation (gender/sex, partner number, and action/behavior), we found evidence that sexual interests were both branched and coincident. These findings contribute to new understandings about the multifaceted nature of sexual orientations across contexts and provide a novel way to measure, conceptualize, and understand sexual orientation in context.

Microwave soft x-ray microscopy for nanoscale magnetization dynamics in the 5-10 GHz frequency range.

We present a scanning transmission x-ray microscopy setup combined with a novel microwave synchronization scheme for studying high frequency magnetization dynamics at synchrotron light sources. The sensitivity necessary to detect small changes in the magnetization on short time scales and nanometer spatial dimensions is achieved by combining the excitation mechanism with single photon counting electronics that is locked to the synchrotron operation frequency. Our instrument is capable of creating direct images of dynamical phenomena in the 5-10 GHz range, with high spatial resolution. When used together with circularly polarized x-rays, the above capabilities can be combined to study magnetic phenomena at microwave frequencies, such as ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) and spin waves. We demonstrate the capabilities of our technique by presenting phase resolved images of a ∼6 GHz nanoscale spin wave generated by a spin torque oscillator, as well as the uniform ferromagnetic precession with ∼0.1° amplitude at ∼9 GHz in a micrometer-sized cobalt strip.