In last month’s blog post, I described my second patent, which raises the question, What was my first patent?
In 1998, my colleagues and I were issued United States Patent No. US 5 789 961 “Nose- and coupling-tuned signal processor with arrays of nonlinear elements”. The work began during my 1994-1995 sabbatical with the Applied Chaos Lab at Georgia Tech and continued for several years, including the two publications listed below.
Already well-known was the phenomenon of stochastic resonance, where the ability of a bistable system to detect a weak periodic signal could be optimized by non-zero noise, which might seem counter-intuitive. In simulations I performed on a NeXT computer, we explored the effects of coupling such stochastic resonators into arrays and found that signal detection was further enhanced by intermediate coupling, even if it were local and linear.
The March 1996 Physics Today cover was an illustration, created in my Wooster office, summarizing our results: with coupling increases rightward and noise increases upward, each square represents the spatiotemporal evolution of the array at that coupling and noise with space increasing rightward and time increasing upward and doppler colors indicating movement between the two stable states (coded red and blue). Note the regular alternating bands at the optimal coupling and noise, \{10^2,10^5\}.
This Physics Today cover prompted vehement letters-to-the-editor, not about the figure itself, but about the vertical split in the cover, which opened to an advertisement! I believe this is the only such cover Physics Today has ever published.
Physics Today cover I created in my Wooster office based on our array enhanced stochastic resonance research, for which we were awarded a US patent. The remarkable cover features a split that opens to an advertisement!
Array Enhanced Stochastic Resonance and Spatiotemporal Synchronization, J. F. Lindner, B. Meadows, W. Ditto, M. Inchiosa, A. Bulsara, Physical Review Letters, volume 75, pages 3-6 (3 July 1995) doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.75.3
Scaling Laws for Spatiotemporal Synchronization and Array Enhanced Stochastic Resonance, J. F. Lindner, B. Meadows, W. Ditto, M. Inchiosa, A. Bulsara, Physical Review E, volume 53, pages 2081-2086 (March 1996) doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.53.2081