Traditional lesion or inactivation methods are useful for determining if a given brain area is involved in the generation of a behavior, but not for determining if circuit dynamics in that area control the timing of the behavior. In contrast, localized mild cooling or heating of a brain area alters the speed of neuronal and circuit dynamics and can reveal the role of that area in the control of...

In this work, we model a thermoelectric shape memory alloy(SMA) actuator as part of a research effort to design high-force, high-frequency SMA actuators. Cyclic phase transformation in a SMA layer is achieved by alternately heatinglc6oling using the thermoelectric Peltier effect. The thermal and mechanical fields during phase transformation are, in general, highly coupled and the extent of this...

In this work, we propose an hybrid multi-objective optimization design procedure for PI controller tuning. This procedure focuses on reliability-based optimization instances, where Montecarlo methods are used to evaluate quantitatively the performance degradation of a controller, due to unexpected or unmodeled dynamics. The procedure is evaluated on a non-linear Peltier process. The presented r...

This is a shortened version of a paper written for the forthcoming Festschrift in honour of Utsa Patnaik, to be edited by C P Chandrasekhar and Arindam Banerjee, and published by Tulika Books. A working paper version of the full study is also available online at: http://www.peri.umass.edu/fi leadmin/pdf/working_papers/working_ papers_351-400/WP389.pdf We are grateful to the editors of the forth...

Thermal assistance has been shown to significantly reduce the required operation power for spin torque transfer magnetic random access memory (STT-MRAM). Proposed heating methods include modified material stack compositions that result in increased self-heating or external heat sources. In this work we analyze the self-heating process of a standard perpendicular magnetic anisotropy STT-MRAM dev...

Speckle interferometric technique is employed to record a series of hundreds of short-exposure images of several close binary stars with subarcsecond separation through a narrow band filter at the Cassegrain focus of the 2.34 meter (m) Vainu Bappu telescope (VBT), situated at Vainu Bappu Observatory (VBO), Kavalur, India. The data are recorded sequentially by a Peltier-cooled intensified CCD ca...