Using Target Ablation for Ion Beam Quality Improvement

During the laser foil interaction, the output ion beam quality including the energy spread and beam divergence can be improved by the target ablation, due to the direct laser acceleration （DLA） electrons generated in tile ablation plasma. The acceleration field established at the target rear by these electrons, which is highly directional and triangle-envelope, is helpful for the beam quality. With the help of the target ablation, both the beam divergence and energy spread will be reduced. If the ablation is more sufficient, the impact of DLA-electron-caused field will be strengthened, and the beam quality will be better, confirmed by the particle-in-cell simulation.

SLP-2: a potential new target for improving mitochondrial function in Parkinson's disease

Parkinson＇s disease （PD） is a progressive neurodegenerative disease, which is generally considered a multifactorial disorder that arises owing to a combination of genes and environmental factors. While most cases are idiopathic, in about 10% of the patients a genetic cause can be detected, ascribable to mutations in more than a dozen genes. PD is characterized clinically by tremor, rigidity, reduced mo- tor activity （bradykinesia）, and postural instability and pathological- ly by loss of dopaminergic （DA） neurons in the substantia nigra pars compacta, loss of DA innervation in the striatum, and the presence of a-synuclein positive aggregates in the form of Lewy bodies. The symptomatic treatment of PD with levodopa, which aims at replac- ing dopamine, remains the gold standard, and no neuroprotective or disease-modifying therapy is available. During treatment, the disease continues to progress, and long-term use of levodopa has import- ant limitations including motor complications termed dyskinesias. Therefore, a pharmacological therapy able to prevent or halt the neu- rodegenerative process is urgently required.

Improved multilevel filters to enhance infrared small target

We propose improved multilevel filters （IMLFs） involving the absolute value operation into the algorithmic framework of traditional multilevel filters （MLFs） to improve the robustness of infrared small target enhancement techniques under a complex infrared cluttered background. Compared with the widely used small target enhancement methods which only deal with bright targets, the proposed technique can enhance the infrared small target, whether it is bright or dark. Experimental results verify that the proposed technique is efficient and practical.

An auditory periphery model for improving narrow-band noise recognition rate of underwater targets

The recognition rate of the auditory periphery features decreases when the model is used to identify underwater targets in practice. To solve this problem, an improved method based on Gammatone filter bank is proposed. Firstly, after the reason of the decreasing of the recognition results is analyzed, the mechanism of multichannel data acquisition in acoustic engineering may narrow down signal frequency range, which leads to time-frequency features distortion. Secondly, the Gammatone filter bank is implemented to simulate frequency decom- position characteristics of human ear basilar membrane. Since the class information of the underwater noise signal is mostly contained in low frequency range, the auditory features of the conventional model are interpolated and the channel number of the filter bank and the central frequency of each frequency band are adjusted accordingly to obtain a 27-dimensional feature vector of the narrow-band target signal. The adjusted model may reflect the target＇s time- frequency feature more precisely. Finally, the performance of the auditory features is tested by a Neural Network classifier. The experiment results show that the modified auditory model is more effective than the conventional ones. The major information contained in broadband signals is reserved and the classification ability for real targets is further enhanced. The recog- nition results are increased from 82.59% to 88.80%. The modified auditory features effectively improve the recognition rate for underwater target radiated noise signals.