Marangoni force-driven manipulation of photothermally-induced microbubbles.

The generation and manipulation of microbubbles by means of temperature gradients induced by low power laser radiation is presented. A laser beam (λ = 1064 nm) is divided into two equal parts and coupled to two multimode optical fibers. The opposite ends of each fiber are aligned and separated a distance D within an ethanol solution. Previously, silver nanoparticles were photo deposited on the optical fibers ends. Light absorption at the nanoparticles produces a thermal gradient capable of generating a microbubble at the optical fibers end in non-absorbent liquids. The theoretical and experimental studies carried out showed that by switching the thermal gradients, it is possible to generate forces in opposite directions, causing the migration of microbubbles from one fiber optic tip to another. Marangoni force induced by surface tension gradients in the bubble wall is the driving force behind the manipulation of microbubbles. We estimated a maximum Marangoni force of 400nN for a microbubble with a radius of 110 µm.

High-precision and fast computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments for image description.

A high-precision and fast algorithm for computation of Jacobi-Fourier moments (JFMs) is presented. A fast recursive method is developed for the radial polynomials that occur in the kernel function of the JFMs. The proposed method is numerically stable and very fast in comparison with the conventional direct method. Moreover, the algorithm is suitable for computation of the JFMs of the highest orders. The JFMs are generic expressions to generate orthogonal moments changing the parameters α and ß of Jacobi polynomials. The quality of the description of the proposed method with α and ß parameters known is studied. Also, a search is performed of the best parameters, α and ß, which significantly improves the quality of the reconstructed image and recognition. Experiments are performed on standard test images with various sets of JFMs to prove the superiority of the proposed method in comparison with the direct method. Furthermore, the proposed method is compared with other existing methods in terms of speed and accuracy.