Chirality identification of Ibuprofen enantiomers by a terahertz polarization-sensitive metasurface sensor.

Chirality plays an important role in medicine, biology, and chemistry. Molecules of different chirality could display dramatically different medical effects, pharmacological activities, and physiological impacts. Ibuprofen is an important anti-inflammatory drug in clinics. The anti-inflammatory effect is almost solely attributed to the (S)-(+)-Ibuprofen, while its enantiomer (R)-(-)-Ibuprofen plays a negative effect on increasing the metabolic burden. In this work, a terahertz (THz) polarization-sensitive metasurface sensor is proposed for qualitative and quantitative identification of the chiral Ibuprofen. The chirality parameters of Ibuprofen are extracted from the circular-polarized transmission coefficients. The parameters are further used to simulate the coupling mechanism between the Ibuprofen and the sensor to explain the principle of recognition. The sensitivities of (R)-(-)-Ibuprofen and (S)-(+)-Ibuprofen are found to be 1.5 THz/(mg/L) and 1.8 THz/(mg/L) for the TM polarization, respectively, and 1.7 THz/(mg/L) and 2.1 THz/(mg/L) for the TE polarization, respectively. The difference enables the chirality identification according to the different frequency shift at the same concentration. The exceptional specificity and sensitivity provide a new avenue for chiral molecular recognition.

Recent Advances in Photothermal Therapy at Near-Infrared-II Based on 2D MXenes.

The use of photothermal therapy (PTT) with the near-infrared II region (NIR-II: 1000-1700 nm) is expected to be a powerful cancer treatment strategy. It retains the noninvasive nature and excellent temporal and spatial controllability of the traditional PTT, and offers significant advantages in terms of tissue penetration depth, background noise, and the maximum permissible exposure standards for skin. MXenes, transition-metal carbides, nitrides, and carbonitrides are emerging inorganic nanomaterials with natural biocompatibility, wide spectral absorption, and a high photothermal conversion efficiency. The PTT of MXenes in the NIR-II region not only provides a valuable reference for exploring photothermal agents that respond to NIR-II in 2D inorganic nanomaterials, but also be considered as a promising biomedical therapy. First, the synthesis methods of 2D MXenes are briefly summarized, and the laser light source, mechanism of photothermal conversion, and evaluation criteria of photothermal performance are introduced. Second, the latest progress of PTT based on 2D MXenes in NIR-II are reviewed, including titanium carbide (Ti3 C2 ), niobium carbide (Nb2 C), and molybdenum carbide (Mo2 C). Finally, the main problems in the PTT application of 2D MXenes to NIR-II and future research directions are discussed.

Charge Carriers Localization Effect Revealed through Terahertz Spectroscopy of MXene: Ti3C2Tx.

The transport properties of charge carriers in MXene, a promising material, have been studied using terahertz time-domain spectroscopy (THz-TDS) to examine its potential applications in optical and electronic devices. However, previous studies have been limited by narrow frequency ranges, which have hindered the understanding of the intrinsic mechanisms of carrier transport in MXenes. To address this issue, ultrabroadband THz-TDS with frequencies of up to 15 THz to investigate the complex photoconductances of MXene (Ti3C2Tx) films with different thicknesses are employed. The findings indicate that the electronic localization is substrate-dependent, and this effect decreases with an increase in the number of layers. This is attributed to the screening effect of the high carrier density in Ti3C2Tx. Additionally, the layer-independent photocarrier relaxations revealed by optical pump THz probe spectroscopy (OPTP) provide evidence of the carrier heating-induced screening effect. These results are significant for practical applications in both scientific research and various industries.

Resonant Magnetoelectric Coupling of Fe-Si-B/Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 Laminated Composites with Surface Crystalline Layers.

The resonant magnetoelectric (ME) effect of Fe78Si9B13/Pb(Zr,Ti)O3 (FeSiB/PZT) composites with a surface-modified Fe78Si9B13 amorphous alloy has been studied. The surface-modified FeSiB can improve the ME coefficient at the resonant frequency by optimizing the magnetomechancial power conversion efficiency. The maximum ME coefficient of the surface-modified ribbons combined with soft PZT (PZT5) is two-thirds larger than that of the composites with fully amorphous ribbons. Meanwhile, the maximum value of the ME coefficient with surface-modified FeSiB ribbons and hard PZT (PZT8) is one-third higher compared with the fully amorphous composites. In addition, experimental results of magnetomechanical coupling properties of FeSiB/PZT composites with or without piezoelectric layers indicate that the power efficiency of the composites first decreases and then increases with the increase in the number of FeSiB layers. When the surface crystalline FeSiB ribbons are combined with a commercially available hard piezoelectric ceramic plate, the maximum magnetoelectric coupling coefficient of the ME composite reaches 5522 V/(Oe*cm), of which the electromechanical resonant frequency is 23.89 kHz.

RadarFormer: End-to-End Human Perception With Through-Wall Radar and Transformers.

For fine-grained human perception tasks such as pose estimation and activity recognition, radar-based sensors show advantages over optical cameras in low-visibility, privacy-aware, and wall-occlusive environments. Radar transmits radio frequency signals to irradiate the target of interest and store the target information in the echo signals. One common approach is to transform the echoes into radar images and extract the features with convolutional neural networks. This article introduces RadarFormer, the first method that introduces the self-attention (SA) mechanism to perform human perception tasks directly from radar echoes. It bypasses the imaging algorithm and realizes end-to-end signal processing. Specifically, we give constructive proof that processing radar echoes using the SA mechanism is at least as expressive as processing radar images using the convolutional layer. On this foundation, we design RadarFormer, which is a Transformer-like model to process radar signals. It benefits from the fast-/slow-time SA mechanism considering the physical characteristics of radar signals. RadarFormer extracts human representations from radar echoes and handles various downstream human perception tasks. The experimental results demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art radar-based methods both in performance and computational cost and obtains accurate human perception results even in dark and occlusive environments.

Ultra-Wideband and High-Gain Vivaldi Antenna with Artificial Electromagnetic Materials.

An ultra-wideband and high-gain Vivaldi antenna with artificial electromagnetic material, suitable for ground-penetrating radar (GPR) systems, is proposed. Directors loaded inside the antenna gradient slot direct electromagnetic waves by inducing current to improve gain. The artificial electromagnetic material, also called metamaterial, is composed of multiple "H"-shaped units arranged in a certain regular pattern, loaded at the antenna aperture. The artificial electromagnetic units affect the antenna radiation waves by changing the refractive index to improve radiation directivity. The four Vivaldi units are arranged into a horn-shaped array, and each two units are orthogonally fed to realize dual polarization. Experimental results demonstrate that the antenna has good impedance matching of S11≤-10 dB in 0.9-4 GHz, and the maximum realized gain can reach 15.2 dBi.

A Millimeter-Wave 3D Imaging Algorithm for MIMO Synthetic Aperture Radar.

Multiple-input-multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) is being studied and applied in more and more scenarios. However, there is still a certain distance away from real-time imaging using advanced algorithms. The traditional backpropagation algorithm (BPA) multi-accumulation integration is unsuitable for dealing with large-size scanning data, and the wavenumber domain algorithm requires the array to satisfy Nyquist sampling law in azimuth to avoid aliasing in imaging reconstruction. Based on these issues, a novel 3D imaging method is proposed for MIMO-SAR. An appropriate transformation and inverse Fourier transform (FT) is carried out for the frequency domain; thus, accumulation in the wavenumber domain is not required, which is easy to implement. The computational complexity of the algorithm is much lower than BPA and has better generalizability than the wavenumber domain algorithm. Coherence factor (CF) is also introduced to achieve sidelobe suppression. Proof-of-principle experiments were also carried out in the 92.5 GHz band based on the MIMO-SAR prototype system. Both simulation and experimental results of different distributed targets show good performance of imaging and do not lose the quality of image reconstruction.

Recent Progress of Atomic Magnetometers for Geomagnetic Applications.

The atomic magnetometer is currently one of the most-sensitive sensors and plays an important role in applications for detecting weak magnetic fields. This review reports the recent progress of total-field atomic magnetometers that are one important ramification of such magnetometers, which can reach the technical level for engineering applications. The alkali-metal magnetometers, helium magnetometers, and coherent population-trapping magnetometers are included in this review. Besides, the technology trend of atomic magnetometers was analyzed for the purpose of providing a certain reference for developing the technologies in such magnetometers and for exploring their applications.

Ultrafast Modulation of THz Waves Based on MoTe2-Covered Metasurface.

The sixth generation (6G) communication will use the terahertz (THz) frequency band, which requires flexible regulation of THz waves. For the conventional metallic metasurface, its electromagnetic properties are hard to be changed once after being fabricated. To enrich the modulation of THz waves, we report an all-optically controlled reconfigurable electromagnetically induced transparency (EIT) effect in the hybrid metasurface integrated with a 10-nm thick MoTe2 film. The experimental results demonstrate that under the excitation of the 800 nm femtosecond laser pulse with pump fluence of 3200 µJ/cm2, the modulation depth of THz transmission amplitude at the EIT window can reach 77%. Moreover, a group delay variation up to 4.6 ps is observed to indicate an actively tunable slow light behavior. The suppression and recovery of the EIT resonance can be accomplished within sub-nanoseconds, enabling an ultrafast THz photo-switching and providing a promising candidate for the on-chip devices of the upcoming 6G communication.

Improved SSD network for fast concealed object detection and recognition in passive terahertz security images.

With the strengthening of global anti-terrorist measures, it is increasingly important to conduct security checks in public places to detect concealed objects carried by the human body. Research in recent years has shown that deep learning is helpful for detecting concealed objects in passive terahertz images. However, previous studies have failed to achieve superior accuracy and performance for real-time labeling. Our research aims to propose a novel method for accurate and real-time detection of concealed objects in terahertz images. To reach this goal we trained and tested a promising detector based on deep residual networks using human image data collected by passive terahertz devices. Specifically, we replaced the backbone network of the SSD (Single Shot MultiBox Detector) algorithm with a more representative residual network to reduce the difficulty of network training. Aiming at the problems of repeated detection and missed detection of small targets, a feature fusion-based terahertz image target detection algorithm was proposed. Furthermore, we introduced a hybrid attention mechanism in SSD to improve the algorithm's ability to acquire object details and location information. Finally, the Focal Loss function was introduced to improve the robustness of the model. Experimental results show that the accuracy of the SSD algorithm is improved from 95.04 to 99.92%. Compared with other current mainstream models, such as Faster RCNN, YOLO, and RetinaNet, the proposed method can maintain high detection accuracy at a faster speed. This proposed method based on SSD achieves a mean average precision of 99.92%, an F1 score of 0.98, and a prediction speed of 17 FPS on the validation subset. This proposed method based on SSD-ResNet-50 can provide a technical reference for the application and development of deep learning technology in terahertz smart security systems. In the future, it can be widely used in some public scenarios with real-time security inspection requirements.

A New Weak-Coupling Method with Eccentric Dual Bucking Coils Applied to the PRBS Helicopter TEM System.

In the helicopter transient electromagnetic system (HTEM), weak-coupling coils reduce the mutual inductance of the transmitting and receiving coils, which can protect the data acquisition circuit and improve the signal-to-noise of the system. The PRBS HTEM system is a newly proposed multi-receiver EM measurement system, which can effectively identify the system impulse response of the unknown geological model based on the high-precision synchronous recording signal of the PRBS emitted current and induced voltage. However, the standard PRBS current signal is turned on/off very quickly, easily resulting in signal saturation. Concerning this problem, this paper proposes a new weak-coupling structure named eccentric dual bucking coils for the multi-receiver EM system by analyzing the on/off characteristics of PRBS current and the magnetic field distribution of the transmitter-receiver system. It also verifies the feasibility of the proposed structure by Maxwell software simulation. Furthermore, considering the influence of the residual primary field and other factors, the data preprocessing results of the PRBS method and the traditional square wave method are compared by theoretical analysis and data simulation, and the results show that the earlier-time response data can be obtained by PRBS method under the same simulation conditions. Finally, the reliability of the proposed method is verified by ground experiment.

Magnetomechanical Properties of Fe-Si-B and Fe-Co-Si-B Metallic Glasses by Various Annealing Temperatures for Actuation Applications.

Fe-based amorphous alloys have advantages of low iron loss and high effective permeability, which are widely used in sensors and actuators. Power efficiency is one of the most important indicators among power conversion applications. We compared the magnetomechancial power conversion factors of metallic glassy ribbons FeCoSiB (Vitrovac 7600) and FeSiB (Metglas 2605SA1). We investigated the crystallization process under different annealing temperatures and tested the magnetomechancial coupling factors (k) and quality factors (Q) by using resonant and anti-resonant methods. We found that the maximum coupling factor of the annealed Vitrovac ribbons was 23% and the figure of merits k2Q was 4-7; however, the maximum coupling factor of the annealed Metglas ribbons was 73% and the maximum value of k2Q was 16. We can observe that the Metglas 2605SA1 ribbons have higher values of the magnetomechanical power efficiency than those of the Vitrovac 7600 ribbons, which means they are better to be used in subsequent research regarding acoustically driven antennas.

Optically Controlled Ultrafast Terahertz Metadevices with Ultralow Pump Threshold.

Arming metasurface with active materials furnishes a feasible solution to dynamically control over terahertz (THz) waves, which is extremely significant for the realization of upcoming sixth generation telecommunications. However, the present active materials are mainly limited to single external driving field, hindering the capability of metasurface for flexible manipulation of THz waves. Besides, less attention has been paid to the energy question how to significantly reduce the pump threshold for achieving the desired function. Here, a germanium (Ge) hybrid Fano metasurface under dual-stimulus control is experimentally demonstrated. Photoexcitation of Ge thin film enables 100% modulation depth of Fano resonance and ultrafast switching time within 10 ps. By adding current-bias, the pump threshold to modulate the metasurface is greatly reduced from 1600 to 200 µJ cm-2 . Different from the optical modulation independent of film thickness, it is found that the current function is in proportion with the thickness of Ge thin film. Moreover, it is demonstrated that compared to the single optical-stimulus, the THz amplitude modulation is increased by 56.3% under dual-stimulus function. This work naturally improves the flexibility and practicality of Ge-based metadevice and inspires more innovations to boost the development of switchable sensing, lasing spacer, and nonlinear systems.

Identifying the Intermediate Free-Carrier Dynamics Across the Charge Separation in Monolayer MoS2/ReSe2 Heterostructures.

Van der Waals heterostructures composed of different two-dimensional films offer a unique platform for engineering and promoting photoelectric performances, which highly demands the understanding of photocarrier dynamics. Herein, large-scale vertically stacked heterostructures with MoS2 and ReSe2 monolayers are fabricated. Correspondingly, the carrier dynamics have been thoroughly investigated using different ultrafast spectroscopies, including Terahertz (THz) emission spectroscopy, time-resolved THz spectroscopy (TRTS), and near-infrared optical pump-probe spectroscopy (OPPS), providing complementary dynamic information for the out-of-plane charge separation and in-plane charge transport at different stages. The initial charge transfer (CT) within the first 170 fs, generating a transient directional current, is directly demonstrated by the THz emissions. Furthermore, the TRTS explicitly unveils an intermediate free-carrier relaxation pathway, featuring a pronounced augmentation of THz photoconductivity compared to the isolated ReSe2 layer, which likely contains the evolution from immigrant hot charged free carriers to bounded interlayer excitons (∼0.7 ps) and the surface defect trapping (∼13 ps). In addition, the OPPS reveals a distinct enhancement in the saturable absorption along with long-lived dynamics (∼365 ps), which originated from the CT and interlayer exciton recombination. Our work provides comprehensive insight into the photocarrier dynamics across the charge separation and will help with the development of optoelectronic devices based on ReSe2-MoS2 heterostructures.

Image reconstruction algorithm based on frequency-wavenumber decoupling for three-dimensional MIMO-SAR imaging.

In this paper, a frequency-wavenumber decoupling algorithm with high-efficiency and high-precise for three-dimensional (3-D) multiple-input-multiple-output synthetic aperture radar (MIMO-SAR) imaging is proposed. Based on one-dimensional (1-D) MIMO array combined with synthetic aperture scan along another dimension, MIMO-SAR imaging scheme allows the number of array elements to be greatly reduced compared with the two-dimensional (2-D) MIMO arrays. By multi-dimensional Fourier transforming and Method of Stationary Phase (MSP), analytical expression of the object function in the frequency-wavenumber domain was derived. By further expanding the range Fourier transform factor to its Taylor series form, the range compression can be realized by a simple fast Fourier transform (FFT) without multi-dimensional interpolation. After that, a decoupling factor was multiplied to compensate for the cross-range and range coupling in frequency domain. Finally, 2-D IFFT is carried out after rearrangement in the MIMO spatial frequency to get a fully focused 3-D image. Simulation and experimental results demonstrated that the algorithm can obtain the same high-precision images as back projection (BP) algorithm, and has the same high efficiency as range migration algorithm (RMA) while avoiding cumbersome multi-dimensional interpolation. A bistatic prototype imaging system in 0.1 THz band was designed for the proof-of-principle experiments. The 3-D reconstruction results of different targets were presented to verify the theoretical results and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm for MIMO-SAR imaging.

Simultaneous Estimation of Rebar Diameter and Cover Thickness by a GPR-EMI Dual Sensor.

Precise characterization of reinforcing bars (rebars) in a concrete structure is of significant importance for construction quality control and post-disaster safety evaluation. This paper integrates ground-penetrating radar (GPR) and electromagnetic induction (EMI) methods for simultaneous estimation of rebar diameter and cover thickness. A prototype of GPR-EMI dual sensor is developed, and a calibration experiment is conducted to collect a standard EMI dataset corresponding to various rebar diameters and cover thicknesses. The handheld testing cart can synchronously collect both GPR and EMI data when moving on the concrete surface, from which a data processing algorithm is proposed to simultaneously estimate the rebar diameter and cover thickness. Firstly, by extracting the apex of the hyperbolic reflection from the rebar in the preprocessed GPR profile, the rebar position is determined and further used to extract the effective EMI curve. Then, the rebar diameter and cover thickness are simultaneously estimated from the minimum mean square error between the measured and calibrated EMI data under the constraint of the GPR-estimated cover thickness. A laboratory experiment is performed using four casted concrete specimens with 11 embedded steel rebars. The results show that the diameters of 10 rebars are correctly estimated out of the 11 rebars, and the maximum estimation error for the cover thickness is 6.7%. A field trial is carried out in a newly-constructed building, and the diameters of four tested rebars are all accurately estimated while the estimation errors of the cover thickness are less than 5%. It is concluded that the developed GPR-EMI dual sensor and the proposed algorithm can estimate the rebar diameter and cover thickness accurately by a single scan.

A Hybrid Method Applied to Improve the Efficiency of Full-Waveform Inversion for Pavement Characterization.

Ground penetrating radar (GPR), as a nondestructive testing tool, is suitable for estimating the thickness and permittivity of layers within the pavement. However, it would become problematic when the layer is thin with respect to the probing pulse width, in which case overlapping between the reflected pulses occurs. In order to deal with this problem, a hybrid method based on multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) and a local optimization algorithm is proposed. This method can be divided into two stages. In the first stage, the MLPs roughly estimate the thickness and the permittivity of the GPR signal. In the second stage, these roughly estimated values are used as the initial solution of the full-waveform inversion algorithm. The hybrid method and the conventional global optimization algorithm are respectively used to perform the full-waveform inversion of the simulated GPR data. Under the same inversion precision, the objective function needs to be calculated for 450 times and 30 times for the conventional method and the hybrid method, respectively. The hybrid method is also applied to a measured data, and the thickness estimation error is 1.2 mm. The results show the high efficiency and accuracy of such hybrid method to resolve the problem of estimating the thickness and permittivity of a "thin layer".

Realizing frequency controlled wide-angle beam scanning with an artificial electromagnetic structure in the terahertz band.

In this paper, an approach to achieve wide-angle beam scanning in the terahertz (THz) band with frequency sweeping was proposed based on a metasurface structure. To widen the scanning angular scope, a coherent enhancement mechanism for improving the mode competition efficiency of the high-order diffraction mode was first implemented. A systematic method was firstly developed for the design of practical frequency-controlled beam scanning quasi-optics in THz band, in which the optimization of scanning range, linearity, and the avoidance of beam blocking are comprehensively considered. The proposed concept and approach was verified by the measured wide-angle beam scanning at the 0.18-0.22THz frequency band, with a diffraction efficiency of the main lobe as high as 88 percent. The good performance of the device paves the way for potential applications in THz imaging, moving target detection, and communication.

A Novel Strategy for Improving the Aeromagnetic Compensation Performance of Helicopters.

An aeromagnetic survey is an important method in magnetic anomaly detection and geophysical prospecting. The magnetic field is typically measured by optically pumped magnetometers (OPM) installed on the aircraft. The measurement accuracy of the OPM is easily affected by the platform-generated magnetic fields. Therefore, aeromagnetic compensation is necessary. The traditional compensation model only considers the permanent, induced, and eddy current interference magnetic field of the aircraft platform. However, the interference field produced by the avionics system, and the relative motion between the aircraft and the magnetometer, are still not taken into account. To address this issue, we proposed a novel strategy to eliminate the additional interference of the platform with two OPMs. Among them, the OPM located farther away from the aircraft serves as a sensing magnetometer, whereas the near OPM serves as a reference magnetometer. The coherent noise suppression method is used to process the residual magnetic field interference after compensation. By establishing the interference magnetic transfer function between the two sensors, the interference field can be suppressed. The results of the experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the novel strategy, and the standard deviation of residual interference drops from 0.065 nT to 0.045 nT.

Research and Analysis on the Localization of a 3-D Single Source in Lossy Medium Using Uniform Circular Array.

In this paper, the methods and analysis for estimating the location of a three-dimensional (3-D) single source buried in lossy medium are presented with uniform circular array (UCA). The mathematical model of the signal in the lossy medium is proposed. Using information in the covariance matrix obtained by the sensors' outputs, equations of the source location (azimuth angle, elevation angle, and range) are obtained. Then, the phase and amplitude of the covariance matrix function are used to process the source localization in the lossy medium. By analyzing the characteristics of the proposed methods and the multiple signal classification (MUSIC) method, the computational complexity and the valid scope of these methods are given. From the results, whether the loss is known or not, we can choose the best method for processing the issues (localization in lossless medium or lossy medium).