Publications by authors named "S Merlini"
Article Synopsis
- The study discusses experiments using pulsed-power to create differentially rotating plasmas, mimicking conditions found in astrophysical disks and jets.
- Angular momentum is introduced through ablation flows from a wire array, rather than boundary forces, leading to a plasma jet that rotates upwards.
- The jet exhibits subsonic rotation with a velocity of around 23 km/s and shows a quasi-Keplerian velocity profile, completing up to two rotations in about 150 nanoseconds.
Article Synopsis
- The study investigates perpendicular subcritical shocks created in a laboratory plasma environment using obstacles in a supermagnetosonic outflow from a z pinch setup.
- It confirms the presence of these shocks and notes the formation of secondary shocks downstream, with measurements revealing no significant hydrodynamic jump in shock structure.
- Additionally, the research finds minimal heating across the shock and demonstrates that the classical resistive diffusion length is roughly equal to the width of the shock, indicating low viscous dissipation.
We report on a recently developed laser-probing diagnostic, which allows direct measurements of ray-deflection angles in one axis while retaining imaging capabilities in the other axis. This allows us to measure the spectrum of angular deflections from a laser beam, which passes through a turbulent high-energy-density plasma. This spectrum contains information about the density fluctuations within the plasma, which deflect the probing laser over a range of angles.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOptical collective Thomson scattering (TS) is used to diagnose magnetized high energy density physics experiments at the Magpie pulsed-power generator at Imperial College London. The system uses an amplified pulse from the second harmonic of a Nd:YAG laser (3 J, 8 ns, 532 nm) to probe a wide diversity of high-temperature plasma objects, with densities in the range of 10-10 cm and temperatures between 10 eV and a few keV. The scattered light is collected from 100 μm-scale volumes within the plasmas, which are imaged onto optical fiber arrays.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe presence of high-affinity brain-derived neurotrophic factor receptor Trk B in mouse and in human fetal oocytes, together with the presence of neurotrophins in human follicular fluid suggests a paracrine role for brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) in female biology. This study aims to evaluate if BDNF is present and quantitatively determined in human menstrual blood and endometrium. Twenty-one women were studied and subdivided in two groups: A, 11 fertile women (27 ± 2 days cycle length) and B, 10 anovulatory women and/or women with inadequate luteal phase (36 ± 2 days cycle length).
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