The aperture photometry package ‘vaphot’ was developed to perform reliable and precise time-series photometry of uncrowded fields. This package works within the IRAF environment and is built upon the standard aperture photometry task ‘phot’ from IRAF. The design goal of ‘vaphot’ was a simple-to-use photometry task with relatively few input parameters that performs precise aperture photometry, u...

Several submicron probe technologies require the use of apertures to serve as electrical, optical or fluidic probes; for example, writing precisely using an atomic force microscope or near-field sensing of light reflecting from a biological surface. Controlling the size of such apertures below 100 nm is a challenge in fabrication. One way to accomplish this scale is to use high resolution tools...

Neurons in primary visual cortex (V1) can be indirectly affected by visual stimulation positioned outside their receptive fields. Although this contextual modulation has been intensely studied, we have little notion of how it manifests with naturalistic stimulation. Here, we investigated how the V1 response to a natural image fragment is affected by spatial context that is consistent or inconsi...

In passive scattering proton therapy, patient specific collimators (apertures) are used to laterally shape the proton beam, and compensators are employed to distally conform proton dose to the target. Brass is a commonly used material for apertures and recently a hybrid brass/stainless-steel (BR/SST) aperture design has been introduced to reduce treatment cost without clinical flow change. We m...

The paper shows how the diffusive movement of ions through a channel protein can be described as a chemical reaction over an arbitrary shaped potential barrier. The result is simple and intuitive but without approximation beyond the electrodiffusion description of ion movement.

We introduce a model detector which registers the passage of a particle through the detector location, without substantially perturbing the particle wave function. (The exact time of passage is not determined in such measurements.) We then show that our detector can operate in a classically forbidden region and register particles passing through a certain point under a potential barrier. We sho...

Traditional optical systems utilize mechanical parts (e.g., gears, motors, and drivers) to allow adjustable focusing and magnification. Emerging variable-focus microlenses have exhibited the potential to miniaturize and advance optical systems without the need for mechanical parts, impacting significantly on a multitude of fields, such as cameras, biomedical instruments, and lab-on-a-chip syste...