Absfrucf-We have investigated the properties of YBa2Cu307-I ramp-edge Josephson junctions with surface-modified barriers produced by Ar-ion irradiation followed by oxygen annealing. The fabricated junctions displayed RSJ-like I-V characteristics and excellent uniformity. The stray capacitance of the junctions was estimated from the ramp-edge structure. The junction capacitance was obtained by subtracting the stray capacitance from the shunting capacitance. W e estimated the barrier thickness from the junction capacitance, and found that the critical current density of the junction increased exponentially with decreasing barrier thickness. The relative dielectric constant of the barriers ranged from 13 to 18.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

Metabolite diffusion is expected to provide more specific microstructural and functional information than water diffusion. However, highly accurate measurement techniques have still not been developed, especially for reducing motion artifacts caused by cardiac pulsation and respiration. We developed a diffusion-weighted line-scan echo-planar spectroscopic imaging (DW-LSEPSI) technique to reduce such motion artifacts in measuring diffusion-weighted images (DWI) of metabolites. Our technique uses line-scan and echoplanar techniques to reduce phase errors induced by such motion during diffusion time. The phase errors are corrected using residual water signals in water suppression for each acquisition and at each spatial pixel specified by combining the line-scan and echo-planar techniques. We apply this technique to a moving phantom and a rat brain in vivo to demonstrate the reduction of motion artifacts in DWI and apparent diffusion coefficient (ADC) maps of metabolites. DW-LSEPSI will be useful for investigating a cellular diffusion environment using metabolites as probes.