Dr. Vergara-Rojas, Samuel

Fiber-optic Mach–Zehnder interferometers are widely used in research areas such as telecommunications, spectroscopy, and quantum information. These optical structures are known to be affected by phase fluctuations that are usually modeled as multiparametric noise. This multidimensional noise must be stabilized or compensated for to enable fiber-optic Mach–Zehnder architectures for practical applications. In this work, we study the effectiveness of a modified Perturb-and-Observe (P&O) algorithm to control multidimensional phase noise in fiber-based multi-arm Mach–Zehnder interferometers. We demonstrate the feasibility of stabilizing multidimensional phase noise by numerical simulations using a simple feedback control scheme and analyze the algorithm’s performance for systems up to dimension 8×8. We achieved minimal steady-state errors that guarantee high optical visibility in complex optical systems with 𝑁×𝑁 matrices (with 𝑁=[2,3,4,5,6,7,8]).

Background Muscular synergies could represent the patterns of muscular activation used by the central nervous system (CNS) to simplify the production of movement. Studies in walking-running transitions described up to nine synergy modules, and an earlier activation of flexor and extension ankle muscular groups compared to running or walking. Our project aims to study the behaviour of muscle synergies in different stance and swing variations of walking-running (WRT) and running-walking (RWT) transitions. Methods Twenty-four trained men participated in this study. A variable speed protocol on a treadmill was developed to record the activity of 14 muscle during walking, running and relative transitions. The protocol was based on five ramps of 50 seconds each around ± 10 and 20% of the WRT speed. WRT and RWT were identified according to an abrupt change of the duty factor. Analysing surface electromyography using non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) we obtained synergy modules and temporal activation profiles. Alpha threshold for statistical tests set at 0.05. Results We described four different transition strides, two for increasing speed transitions, and two for decreasing speed transitions. Four to six synergy modules were found in each condition. According to the maximum cosine similarity results, the two identified WRT conditions shared five modules, while the two RWT conditions shared four modules. WRT and RWT overall shared 4.33 ± 0.58 modules. The activation profiles and centres of activation revealed differences among conditions. Discussion Transition occurred at step level, and transition strides were composed by walk-like and run-like steps. Compared with previous studies in running and walking, both transitions needed earlier activation of a comparable number of synergy modules. Synergies were affected by acceleration: during RWT the need to dissipate energy, to decrease the speed, was achieved by increasing the number of co-activating muscles. This was reflected in fewer synergy modules and different activation profiles compared to WRT. We believe that our results could be enforced in different applied fields, like clinical gait analysis, physiotherapy and rehabilitation, where plans including co-activation of specific muscular groups could be useful. Gait transitions are common in different sports, and therefore also application in training and sport science would be possible.