Recently, the application of ultrasonic arrays has dramatically increased [4][5][6][7], due to their advantages in terms of resolution, coverage, sensitivity and speed, compared to single-element transducers. In traditional ultrasonic array imaging, the same array elements are used to form coherent beam and receive signals, based on the same delay law [8].

No abstract

Ultrasonic B-scan imaging is affected by the acoustic diffraction and electrical effects in nondestructive testing (NDT), resulting in insufficient lateral and temporal resolution for defect characterization. The minimum mean squared error (MMSE) method can improve the resolution by inversing a linear imaging model, which takes the acoustic diffraction and electrical effects into account, and achieve higher resolution than the synthetic aperture focusing technique (SAFT). However, its computation efficiency and resolution improvement are unsatisfactory due to the hypothetical Gaussian distribution of defects. To overcome these problems, a model-based regularized inverse method for ultrasonic B-scan image reconstruction is proposed. Benefitting from the sparse distribution of defects in NDT applications, the proposed method formulates an inverse objective function composed of -norm as well as -norm, and the sparse reconstruction by a separable approximation (SpaRSA) algorithm is adopted to obtain the optimal solution. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by B-scan imaging of two 0.3 mm steel wires conducted both in simulation and experiment. The results verify that the proposed method improves the lateral and temporal resolution simultaneously with high computation efficiency.

We propose a scheme to simulate the interaction between a two-level system and a classical light field. Under the transversal driving of two microwave tones, the system Hamiltonian is identical to that of the general semiclassical Rabi model. We experimentally realize this Hamiltonian with a superconducting transmon qubit. By tuning the strength, phase and frequency of the two microwave driving fields, we simulate the quantum dynamics from weak to extremely strong driving regime. The resulting evolutions gradually deviate from the normal sinusoidal Rabi oscillations with increasing driving strength, in accordance with the predictions of the general semi-classical Rabi model far beyond the weak driving limit. Our scheme provides an effective approach to investigate the extremely strong interaction between a two-level system and a classical light field. Such strong interactions are usually inaccessible in experiments.

No abstract