Maria Inês Carvalho

Abstract
The estimation of atmospheric turbulence parameters is of relevance for the following: (a) site evaluation and characterization; (b) prediction of the point spread function; (c) live assessment of error budgets and optimization of adaptive optics performance; (d) optimization of fringe trackers for long baseline optical interferometry. The ubiquitous deployment of Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensors in large telescopes makes them central for atmospheric turbulence parameter estimation via adaptive optics telemetry. Several methods for the estimation of the Fried parameter and outer scale have been developed, most of which are based on the fitting of Zernike polynomial coefficient variances reconstructed from the telemetry. The non-orthogonality of Zernike polynomial derivatives introduces modal cross coupling, which affects the variances. Furthermore, the finite resolution of the sensor introduces aliasing. In this article the impact of these effects on atmospheric turbulence parameter estimation is addressed with simulations. It is found that cross-coupling is the dominant bias. An iterative algorithm to overcome it is presented. Simulations are conducted for typical ranges of the outer scale (4-32 m), Fried parameter (10 cm) and noise in the variances (signal-to-noise ratio of 10 and above). It is found that, using the algorithm, both parameters are recovered with sub-per cent accuracy.

Abstract
We found stable soliton solutions for two generalizations of the cubic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, namely, one that includes the term that, in optics, represents a delayed response of the nonlinear gain and the other including the self-steepening term, also in the optical context. These solutions do not require the presence of the delayed response of the nonlinear refractive index, such that, they exist regardless of the term previously considered essential for stabilization. The existence of these solitons was predicted by a perturbation approach, and then confirmed by solving the ordinary differential equations, resulting from a similarity reduction, and also by applying a linear stability analysis. We found that these solitons exist for a large region of the parameter space and possess very asymmetric amplitude profiles as well as a complicated chirp characteristic.

Abstract
In this paper the absorption by the human body of electromagnetic (EM) radiation generated by a Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) from a modern mobile phone is investigated through the evaluation of the Specific Absorption Rate (SAR) in head, brain and hand regions using Sim4Life (S4L) and a realistic anatomical model. Several scenarios were evaluated, by varying the distance between the antenna and the head, the feeder position and the orientation of the antenna. The effect of the presence of the hand was also studied and, finally, different communication bands were considered. The main results show that the presence of the hand is determinant to reduce SAR on head and brain, while bottom orientations of the antenna reduce the SAR on the brain, but increase the SAR in other tissues. © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2018.

Abstract

Abstract
In this work, we present parameter regions for the existence of stable plain solitons of the cubic complex Ginzburg-Landau equation (CGLE) with higher-order terms associated with a fourth-order expansion. Using a perturbation approach around the nonlinear Schrdinger equation soliton and a full numerical analysis that solves an ordinary differential equation for the soliton profiles and using the Evans method in the search for unstable eigenvalues, we have found that the minimum equation allowing these stable solitons is the cubic CGLE plus a term known in optics as Raman-delayed response, which is responsible for the redshift of the spectrum. The other favorable term for the occurrence of stable solitons is a term that represents the increase of nonlinear gain with higher frequencies. At the stability boundary, a bifurcation occurs giving rise to stable oscillatory solitons for higher values of the nonlinear gain. These oscillations can have very high amplitudes, with the pulse energy changing more than two orders of magnitude in a period, and they can even exhibit more complex dynamics such as period-doubling.