Uttam Shrestha

Collective molecule formation in a degenerate Fermi gas via a Feshbach resonance

We model collisionless collective conversion of a degenerate Fermi gas of atoms into bosonic molecules via a Feshbach resonance, treating the bosonic molecules as a classical field and seeding the pairing amplitudes with random phases. A dynamical instability of the Fermi sea against association with molecules drives the conversion. The model qualitatively reproduces several experimental observations [Regal et al., Nature (London), (2003)]. We predict that the initial temperature of the Fermi gas sets the limit for the efficiency of atom-molecule conversion.

Pulsating and Persistent Vector Solitons in a Bose-Einstein Condensate in a Lattice upon Phase Separation Instability

We study numerically the outcome of the phase separation instability of a dual-species Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice. When only one excitation mode is unstable a bound pair of bright and dark solitonlike structures periodically appears and disappears, whereas for more than one unstable mode a persistent soliton-antisoliton pair develops. The oscillating soliton represents a regime where the two-species condensate neither remains phase-separated nor is dynamically stable.

Nonlinear Phenomenology from Quantum Mechanics : Soliton in a Lattice

We study a soliton in an optical lattice holding bosonic atoms quantum mechanically using both an exact numerical solution and quantum Monte Carlo simulations. The computation of the state is combined with an explicit account of the measurements of the numbers of the atoms at the lattice sites. In particular, importance sampling in the quantum Monte Carlo method arguably produces faithful simulations of individual experiments. Even though the quantum state is invariant under lattice translations, an experiment may show a noisy version of the localized classical soliton.

Image reconstruction in higher dimensions: myocardial perfusion imaging of tracer dynamics with cardiac motion due to deformation and respiration.

Myocardial perfusion imaging (MPI) using slow rotating large field of view cameras requires spatiotemporal reconstruction of dynamically acquired data to capture the time variation of the radiotracer concentration. In vivo, MPI contains additional degrees of freedom involving unavoidable motion of the heart due to quasiperiodic beating and the effects of respiration, which can severely degrade the quality of the images. This work develops a technique for a single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) that reconstructs the distribution of the radiotracer concentration in the myocardium using a tensor product of different sets of basis functions that approximately describe the spatiotemporal variation of the radiotracer concentration and the motion of the heart. In this study the temporal B-spline basis functions are chosen to reflect the dynamics of the radiotracer, while the intrinsic deformation and the extrinsic motion of the heart are described by a product of a discrete set of Gaussian basis functions. Reconstruction results are presented showing the dynamics of the tracer in the myocardium as it deforms due to cardiac beating, and is displaced due to respiratory motion. These results are compared with the conventional 4D-spatiotemporal reconstruction method that models only the temporal changes of the tracer activity. The higher dimensional reconstruction method proposed here improves bias, yet the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) decreases slightly due to redistribution of the counts over the cardiac-respiratory gates. Additionally, there is a trade-off between the number of gates and the number of projections per gate to achieve high contrast images.

Fragmentation, domain formation and atom number fluctuations of a two-species Bose–Einstein condensate in an optical lattice

We theoretically study the loading of a two-species Bose–Einstein condensate to an optical lattice in a tightly confined one-dimensional trap. Due to quantum fluctuations, the relative inter- and intra-species phase coherence between the atoms and the on-site atom number fluctuations are reduced in the miscible regime. For the immiscible case the fluctuations are enhanced and the atoms form metastable interleaved spatially separated domains where the domain length and its fluctuations are affected by quantum fluctuations.

Handling Big Data in medical imaging: Iterative reconstruction with large-scale automated parallel computation

The primary goal of this project is to implement the iterative statistical image reconstruction algorithm, in this case maximum likelihood expectation maximum (MLEM) used for dynamic cardiac single photon emission computed tomography, on Spark/GraphX. This involves porting the algorithm to run on large-scale parallel computing systems. Spark is an easy-toprogram software platform that can handle large amounts of data in parallel. GraphX is a graph analytic system running on top of Spark to handle graph and sparse linear algebra operations in parallel. The main advantage of implementing MLEM algorithm in Spark/GraphX is that it allows users to parallelize such computation without any expertise in parallel computing or prior knowledge in computer science. In this paper we demonstrate a successful implementation of MLEM in Spark/GraphX and present the performance gains with the goal to eventually make it useable in clinical setting.

Multipinhole collimator with 20 apertures for a brain SPECT application

PURPOSE Several new technologies for single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) instrumentation with parallel-hole collimation have been proposed to improve detector sensitivity and signal collection efficiency. Benefits from improved signal efficiency include shorter acquisition times and lower dose requirements. In this paper, the authors show a possibility of over an order of magnitude enhancement in photon detection efficiency (from 7.6 × 10(-5) to 1.6 × 10(-3)) for dopamine transporter (DaT) imaging of the striatum over the conventional SPECT parallel-hole collimators by use of custom-designed 20 multipinhole (20-MPH) collimators with apertures of 0.75 cm diameter. METHODS Quantifying specific binding ratio (SBR) of (123)I-ioflupane or (123)I-iometopanes signal at the striatal region is a common brain imaging method to confirm the diagnosis of the Parkinsons disease. The authors performed imaging of a striatal phantom filled with aqueous solution of I-123 and compared camera recovery ratios of SBR acquired between low-energy high-resolution (LEHR) parallel-hole collimators and 20-MPH collimators. RESULTS With only two-thirds of total acquisition time (20 min against 30 min), a comparable camera recovery ratio of SBR was achieved using 20-MPH collimators in comparison to that from the LEHR collimator study. CONCLUSIONS Their systematic analyses showed that the 20-MPH collimator could be a promising alternative for the DaT SPECT imaging for brain over the traditional LEHR collimator, which could give both shorter scan time and improved diagnostic accuracy.

Antiferromagnetism in a bosonic mixture of rubidium ({sup 87}Rb) and potassium ({sup 41}K)

We simulate the experimental possibility of observing antiferromagnetic (AF) order in bosonic mixtures of rubidium ({sup 87}Rb) and potassium ({sup 41}K) in a two-dimensional optical lattice in the presence of harmonic confinement. By tuning the interspecies interactions and the lattice heights, we have found the ground states, within the mean-field approximation, that interpolate from phase separation to AF order. For a moderate lattice height, the coexistence of the Mott and AF phases is possible for the Rb atoms whereas the K atoms remain in the AF-superfluid phase. This observation may provide an experimentally feasible route to hitherto unobserved AF order for {sup 87}Rb-{sup 41}K mixtures.

Quantum dynamics of instability-induced pulsations of a Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice

We study quantum dynamics of a Bose-Einstein condensate in a one-dimensional optical lattice in the limit of weak atom-atom interactions within the truncated Wigner approximation for a system with one dynamicallyunstable mode. This extends previous classical studies of a pulsating dynamical instability in which atomsperiodically collect together and subsequently disperse back into the initial homogeneous state. We observethat the quasiperiodic behavior still persists in the presence of quantum fluctuations for a single realization that represents a typical experimental outcome, but ensemble averages show various manifestations of quantum statistics. Quantum effects become more prominent when the effective interaction strength is increased.

Pulsating Instability of a Bose-Einstein Condensate in an Optical Lattice

We find numerically that in the limit of weak atom-atom interactions a Bose-Einstein condensate in an optical lattice may develop a pulsating dynamical instability in which the atoms nearly periodically form a peak in the occupation numbers of the lattice sites, and then return to the unstable initial state. Multiple peaks behaving similarly are also found. Simple arguments show that the pulsating instability is a remnant of integrability, and give a handle on the relevant physical scales.