Water retting is a traditional retting method that enables the low-cost production of bast fibers. This study investigated the retting of flax straws by distilled water for three different durations at room temperature in laboratory condition. The retting quality was evaluated in terms of the weight loss and degumming rate together with the fiber properties, which included color, linear density...

Early in World War II, a new map paper was developed that greatly improved the quality and performance of war maps. The National Bureau of Standards cooperated in the development and, subsequently, determined by experimental manufacture how to make the paper from commercially available raw materials. The best results were obtained in experimental manufacture by using fiber furnishes of 100-perc...

A curvelet denoising method has been proposed to reduce the time domain noise to improve the detection performance in the distributed fiber vibration sensing system based on phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry. The raw Rayleigh backscattering traces are regarded as a gray image and the random noise can be eliminated by the curvelet transform; hence, the amplitude difference induce...

We have developed a tractometer: an online evaluation system for tractography processing pipelines. One can now evaluate the end effects on fiber tracts of different acquisition parameters (b-value, number of directions, denoising or not, averaging or not), different local estimation techniques (tensor, q-ball, spherical deconvolution, spherical wavelets) and to different tractography parameter...

DiameterJ is an open source image analysis plugin for ImageJ. DiameterJ produces ten files for every image that it analyzes. These files include the images that were analyzed, the data to create histograms of fiber radius, pore size, fiber orientation, and summary statistics, as well as images to check the output of DiameterJ. DiameterJ was validated with 130 in silico-derived, digital, synthet...

Quantum cryptography promises to provide communications with unconditional security on the basis of the physical principles of quantum mechanics. We have proposed a quantum key distribution protocol called a differential-phase-shift quantum key distribution (DPS-QKD). This scheme has several advantages including suitability for fiber transmission and highly efficient key generation. In this pap...

We demonstrate highly efficient switching of optical signals between two optical fibers controlled by a single atom. The key element of our experiment is a whispering-gallery-mode bottle microresonator, which is coupled to a single atom and interfaced by two tapered fiber couplers. This system reaches the strong coupling regime of cavity quantum electrodynamics, leading to a vacuum Rabi splitti...