Rivard, M. J., Granero, D., Perez-Calatayud, J., & Ballester, F. (2010). Influence of photon energy spectra from brachytherapy sources on Monte Carlo simulations of kerma and dose rates in water and air. Med. Phys., 37(2), 869–876.
Abstract: Methods: For Ir-192, I-125, and Pd-103, the authors considered from two to five published spectra. Spherical sources approximating common brachytherapy sources were assessed. Kerma and dose results from GEANT4, MCNP5, and PENELOPE-2008 were compared for water and air. The dosimetric influence of Ir-192, I-125, and Pd-103 spectral choice was determined. Results: For the spectra considered, there were no statistically significant differences between kerma or dose results based on Monte Carlo code choice when using the same spectrum. Water-kerma differences of about 2%, 2%, and 0.7% were observed due to spectrum choice for Ir-192, I-125, and Pd-103, respectively (independent of radial distance), when accounting for photon yield per Bq. Similar differences were observed for air-kerma rate. However, their ratio (as used in the dose-rate constant) did not significantly change when the various photon spectra were selected because the differences compensated each other when dividing dose rate by air-kerma strength. Conclusions: Given the standardization of radionuclide data available from the National Nuclear Data Center (NNDC) and the rigorous infrastructure for performing and maintaining the data set evaluations, NNDC spectra are suggested for brachytherapy simulations in medical physics applications.
|
Perez, A. (2010). Information encoding of a qubit into a multilevel environment. Phys. Rev. A, 81(5), 052326–6pp.
Abstract: I consider the interaction of a small quantum system (a qubit) with a structured environment consisting of many levels. The qubit will experience a decoherence process, which implies that part of its initial information will be encoded into correlations between system and environment. I investigate how this information is distributed on a given subset of levels as a function of its size, using the mutual information between both entities, in the spirit of the partial-information plots studied by Zurek and co-workers. In this case we can observe some differences, which arise from the fact that I am partitioning just one quantum system and not a collection of them. However, some similar features, like redundancy (in the sense that a given amount of information is shared by many subsets), which increases with the size of the environment, are also found here.
|
Esteban-Pretel, A., Tomas, R., & Valle, J. W. F. (2010). Interplay between collective effects and nonstandard interactions of supernova neutrinos. Phys. Rev. D, 81(6), 063003–16pp.
Abstract: We consider the effect of nonstandard neutrino interactions (NSI, for short) on the propagation of neutrinos through the supernova (SN) envelope within a three-neutrino framework and taking into account the presence of a neutrino background. We find that for given NSI parameters, with strength generically denoted by epsilon(ij), neutrino evolution exhibits a significant time dependence. For vertical bar epsilon(tau tau)vertical bar greater than or similar to 10(-3) the neutrino survival probability may become sensitive to the V-23 octant and the sign of epsilon(tau tau). In particular, if epsilon(tau tau) greater than or similar to 10(-2) an internal I-resonance may arise independently of the matter density. For typical values found in SN simulations this takes place in the same dense-neutrino region above the neutrinosphere where collective effects occur, in particular, during the synchronization regime. This resonance may lead to an exchange of the neutrino fluxes entering the bipolar regime. The main consequences are (i) bipolar conversion taking place for normal neutrino mass hierarchy and (ii) a transformation of the flux of low-energy v(e), instead of the usual spectral swap.
|
Barragan, C., & Olmo, G. J. (2010). Isotropic and anisotropic bouncing cosmologies in Palatini gravity. Phys. Rev. D, 82(8), 084015–15pp.
Abstract: We study isotropic and anisotropic (Bianchi I) cosmologies in Palatini f(R) and f(R, R μnu R μnu) theories of gravity with a perfect fluid and consider the existence of nonsingular bouncing solutions in the early universe. We find that all f(R) models with isotropic bouncing solutions develop shear singularities in the anisotropic case. On the contrary, the simple quadratic model R + aR(2)/R-P + R μnu R μnu/R-P exhibits regular bouncing solutions in both isotropic and anisotropic cases for a wide range of equations of state, including dust (for a<0) and radiation (for arbitrary a). It thus represents a purely gravitational solution to the big bang singularity and anisotropy problems of general relativity without the need for exotic (w>1) sources of matter/energy or extra degrees of freedom.
|
Blume, M., Martinez-Moller, A., Keil, A., Navab, N., & Rafecas, M. (2010). Joint Reconstruction of Image and Motion in Gated Positron Emission Tomography. IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging, 29(11), 1892–1906.
Abstract: We present a novel intrinsic method for joint reconstruction of both image and motion in positron emission tomography (PET). Intrinsic motion compensation methods exclusively work on the measured data, without any external motion measurements. Most of these methods separate image from motion estimation: They use deformable image registration/optical flow techniques in order to estimate the motion from individually reconstructed gates. Then, the image is estimated based on this motion information. With these methods, a main problem lies in the motion estimation step, which is based on the noisy gated frames. The more noise is present, the more inaccurate the image registration becomes. As we show both visually and quantitatively, joint reconstruction using a simple deformation field motion model can compete with state-of-the-art image registration methods which use robust multilevel B-spline motion models.
|
