arXiv subjects

Olivier Pinaud

Publications and source records attributed to Olivier Pinaud.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Blind source separation for imaging

This work is concerned with the problem of blind source separation and its applications to imaging. We first establish a theoretical result that we stated in our previous article on imaging in diffusive environments. This result is a generalization of separability criteria found in the literature to arbitrary correlated complex-valued sources with additive noise. In a second step, we verify these separability conditions in two propagation regimes frequently encountered in imaging: the speckle regime and the random geometrical optics regime. Finally, we propose a new imaging method based on the blind source separation problem that improves on images obtained with the classical decomposition of the time reversal operator method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2025

On multipolar magnetic anomaly detection: multipolar signal subspaces, an analytical orthonormal basis, multipolar truncature and detection performance

In this paper, we consider the magnetic anomaly detection problem which aims to find hidden ferromagnetic masses by estimating the weak perturbation they induce on local Earth's magnetic field. We consider classical detection schemes that rely on signals recorded on a moving sensor, and modeling of the source as a function of unknown parameters. As the usual spherical harmonic decomposition of the anomaly has to be truncated in practice, we study the signal vector subspaces induced by each multipole of the decomposition, proving they are not in direct sum, and discussing the impact it has on the choice of the truncation order. Further, to ease the detection strategy based on generalized likelihood ratio test, we rely on orthogonal polynomials theory to derive an analytical set of orthonormal functions (multipolar orthonormal basis functions) that spans the space of the noise-free measured signal. Finally, based on the subspace structure of the multipole vector spaces, we study the impact of the truncation order on the detection performance, beyond the issue of potential surparametrization, and the behaviour of the information criteria used to choose this order.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2025

An asymptotic preserving scheme for the quantum Liouville-BGK equation

We are interested in this work in the numerical resolution of the Quantum Liouville-BGK equation, which arises in the derivation of quantum hydrodynamical models from first principles. Such models are often obtained in some asymptotic limits, for instance a diffusion or a fluid limit, and as a consequence the original Liouville equation contains small parameters. A standard method such as a split-step algorithm is then accurate provided the time step is sufficiently small compared to the asymptotic parameter, which is a severe limitation. In the case of the diffusion limit, we propose a numerical method that is accurate for time steps independent of the small parameter, and which captures well both the microscopic dynamics and the diffusion limit. Our approach is substantiated by an informal theoretical error analysis.

math.AP↗

arXiv2025

Bounds and anomalies of inhomogeneous anomalous Hall effects

It is well recognized that interpreting transport experiment results can be challenging when the samples being measured are spatially nonuniform. However, quantitative understanding on the differences between measured and actual transport coefficients, especially the Hall effects, in inhomogeneous systems is lacking. In this work we use homogenization theory to find exact bounds of the measured or homogenized anomalous Hall conductivity (AHC) in inhomogeneous conductors under minimal assumptions. In particular, we prove that the homogenized AHC cannot exceed the bounds of the local AHC. However, in common experimental setups, anomalies that appear to violate the above bounds can occur, with a popular example being the "humps" or "dips" of the Hall hysteresis curves usually ascribed to the topological Hall effect (THE). We give two examples showing how such apparent anomalies could be caused by different types of inhomogeneities and discuss their relevance in experiments.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2024

Analysis and extensions of the Multi-Layer Born method

Simulating scalar wave propagation in strongly heterogeneous media comes at a steep computational cost, and the widely used approach to simplification - split-step operators - sacrifices accuracy. The recently proposed multi-layer Born method has sought to resolve that problem, but because it discards evanescent modes, also produces large errors. In this work our main goal is to propose solutions to this critical issue by including evanescent modes in the simulation. We work in a setting where backscattering can be neglected, allowing us to only calculate forward propagation, and derive two possible schemes. A rigorous mathematical analysis of the numerical errors shows one method is more accurate. This analysis is also helpful for choosing optimally the discretization parameters. In addition, we propose high order versions of the multi-layer Born method that offer a lower computational cost for a given tolerance.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Speckle imaging with blind source separation and total variation deconvolution

This work is concerned with optical imaging in strongly diffusive environments. We consider a typical setting in optical coherence tomography where a sample is probed by a collection of wavefields produced by a laser and propagating through a microscope. We operate in a scenario where the illuminations are in a speckle regime, namely fully randomized. This occurs when the light propagates deep in highly heterogeneous media. State-of-the-art coherent techniques are based on the ballistic part of the wavefield, that is the fraction of the wave that propagates freely and decays exponentially fast. In a speckle regime, the ballistic field is negligible compared to the scattered field, which precludes the use of coherent methods and different approaches are needed. We propose a strategy based on blind source separation and total variation deconvolution to obtain images with diffraction-limited resolution. The source separation allows us to isolate the fields diffused by the different scatterers to be imaged, while the deconvolution exploits the speckle memory effect to estimate the distance between these scatterers. Our method is validated with numerical simulations and is shown to be effective not only for imaging discrete scatterers, but also continuous objects.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

Scaling limit of fluctuations for high contrast stochastic homogenization of the Helmholtz equation: second order moments

This work is concerned with the high contrast stochastic homogenization of the Helmholtz equation. Our goal is to characterize the second order moments of the scaling limit of the fluctuations of the wavefield. We show that these moments are those of a random wavefield solution to a homogenized Helmholtz equation with a white noise source term and obtain expressions for its variance. Two factors contribute to the white noise: fluctuations in the inverse permittivity of the high contrast inhomogeneities, and fluctuations in their size. This problem is motivated by wave propagation in sea ice, which is a random compositive of ice and pockets of air and brine. The analysis hinges on three ingredients: a covariance formula due to Chatterjee for functions of independent random variables; small-volume expansions to quantify the fluctuations due to one inclusion; and the standard two-scale expansions for stochastic homogenization.

math.AP↗

arXiv2024

Synthetic aperture holographic third harmonic generation microscopy

Third harmonic generation (THG) provides a valuable, label-free approach to imaging biological systems. To date, THG microscopy has been performed using point scanning methods that rely on intensity measurements lacking phase information of the complex field. We report the first demonstration of THG holographic microscopy and the reconstruction of the complex THG signal field with spatial synthetic aperture imaging. Phase distortions arising from measurement-to-measurement fluctuations and imaging components cause optical aberrations in the reconstructed THG field. We have developed an aberration-correction algorithm that estimates and corrects for these phase distortions to reconstruct the spatial synthetic aperture THG field without optical aberrations.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2023

A Monte Carlo Method for 3D Radiative Transfer Equations with Multifractional Singular Kernels

We propose in this work a Monte Carlo method for three dimensional scalar radiative transfer equations with non-integrable, space-dependent scattering kernels. Such kernels typically account for long-range statistical features, and arise for instance in the context of wave propagation in turbulent atmosphere, geophysics, and medical imaging in the peaked-forward regime. In contrast to the classical case where the scattering cross section is integrable, which results in a non-zero mean free time, the latter here vanishes. This creates numerical difficulties as standard Monte Carlo methods based on a naive regularization exhibit large jump intensities and an increased computational cost. We propose a method inspired by the finance literature based on a small jumps - large jumps decomposition, allowing us to treat the small jumps efficiently and reduce the computational burden. We demonstrate the performance of the approach with numerical simulations and provide a complete error analysis. The multifractional terminology refers to the fact that the high frequency contribution of the scattering operator is a fractional Laplace-Beltrami operator on the unit sphere with space-dependent index.

math.NA↗

arXiv2023

Aberration free synthetic aperture second harmonic generation holography

Second harmonic generation (SHG) microscopy is a valuable tool for optical microscopy. SHG microscopy is normally performed as a point scanning imaging method, which lacks phase information and is limited in spatial resolution by the spatial frequency support of the illumination optics. In addition, aberrations in the illumination are difficult to remove. We propose and demonstrate SHG holographic synthetic aperture holographic imaging in both the forward (transmission) and backward (epi) imaging geometries. By taking a set of holograms with varying incident angle plane wave illumination, the spatial frequency support is increased and the input and output pupil phase aberrations are estimated and corrected -- producing diffraction limited SHG imaging that combines the spatial frequency support of the input and output optics. The phase correction algorithm is computationally efficient and robust and can be applied to any set of measured field imaging data.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2021

Time reversal of surface plasmons

We study in this work the so-called "instantaneous time mirrors" in the context of surface plasmons. The latter are associated with high frequency waves at the surface of a conducting sheet. Instantaneous time mirrors were introduced by M. Fink et al, with the idea that singular perturbations in the time variable in a wave-type equation create a time-reversed focusing wave. We consider the time-dependent three-dimensional Maxwell's equations, coupled to Drude's model for the description of the surface current. The time mirror is modeled by a sudden, strong, change in the Drude weight of the electrons on the sheet. Our goal is to characterize the time-reversed wave, in particular to quantify the quality of refocusing. We establish that the latter depends on the distance of the source to the sheet, and on some physical parameters such as the relaxation time of the electrons. We also show that, in addition to the plasmonic wave, the time mirror generates a free propagating wave that offers, contrary to the surface wave, some resolution in the direction orthogonal to the sheet. Blurring effects due to non-instantaneous mirrors are finally investigated.

math.AP↗

arXiv2021

Entropy minimization for many-body quantum systems

The problem considered here is motivated by a work by B. Nachtergaele and H.T. Yau where the Euler equations of fluid dynamics are derived from manybody quantum mechanics, see [10]. A crucial concept in their work is that of local quantum Gibbs states, which are quantum statistical equilibria with prescribed particle, current, and energy densities at each point of space (here R d , d $\ge$ 1). They assume that such local Gibbs states exist, and show that if the quantum system is initially in a local Gibbs state, then the system stays, in an appropriate asymptotic limit, in a Gibbs state with particle, current, and energy densities now solutions to the Euler equations. Our main contribution in this work is to prove that such local quantum Gibbs states can be constructed from prescribed densities under mild hypotheses, in both the fermionic and bosonic cases. The problem consists in minimizing the von Neumann entropy in the quantum grand canonical picture under constraints of local particle, current, and energy densities. The main mathematical difficulty is the lack of compactness of the minimizing sequences to pass to the limit in the constraints. The issue is solved by defining auxiliary constrained optimization problems, and by using some monotonicity properties of equilibrium entropies.

math.AP↗

arXiv2021

A splitting scheme for the quantum Liouville-BGK equation

We introduce in this work an efficient numerical method for the simulation of the quantum Liouville-BGK equation, which models the diffusive transport of quantum particles. The corner stone to the model is the BGK collision operator, obtained by minimizing the quantum free energy under the constraint that the local density of particles is conserved during collisions. This leads to a large system of coupled nonlinear nonlocal PDEs whose resolution is challenging. We then define a splitting scheme that separates the transport and the collision parts, which, exploiting the local conservation of particles, leads to a fully linear collision step. The latter involves the resolution of a constrained optimization problem that is is handled with the nonlinear conjugate gradient algorithm. We prove that the time semi-discrete scheme is convergent, and as an application of our numerical scheme, we validate the quantum drift-diffusion model that is obtained as the diffusive limit of the quantum Liouville-BGK equation.

math.NA↗

arXiv2020

Instantaneous time mirrors and wave equations with time-singular coefficients

We study in this work the concept of instantaneous time mirrors that were recently introduced in the physics literature. Instantaneous time mirrors offer a new method for time reversal with a simplified experimental setup compared to classical techniques. At the mathematical level, instantaneous time mirrors are modeled by singularities in the time variable in the coefficients of a wave equation, and a prototype of such singularity is a Dirac delta. Our main goal in this work is to obtain refocusing estimates for the wavefield that quantify the quality of time reversal. This amounts to analyze the wave equation with Dirac-type singularities and develop a proper regularity theory as well as derive uniform estimates.

math.AP↗

arXiv2020

On local quantum Gibbs states

We address in this work the problem of minimizing quantum entropies under local constraints. We suppose macroscopic quantities such as the particle density, current, and kinetic energy are fixed at each point of $\Rm^d$, and look for a density operator over $L^2(\Rm^d)$ minimizing an entropy functional. Such minimizers are referred to as a local Gibbs states. This setting is in constrast with the classical problem of prescribing global constraints, where the total number of particles, total current, and total energy in the system are fixed. The question arises for instance in the derivation of fluid models from quantum dynamics. We prove, under fairly general conditions, that the entropy admits a unique constrained minimizer. Due to a lack of compactness, the main difficulty in the proof is to show that limits of minimizing sequences satisfy the local energy constraint. We tackle this issue by introducing a simpler auxiliary minimization problem and by using a monotonicity argument involving the entropy.

math-ph↗

arXiv2019

Constrained minimizers of the von Neumann entropy and their characterization

We consider in this work the problem of minimizing the von Neumann entropy under the constraints that the density of particles, the current, and the kinetic energy of the system is fixed at each point of space. The unique minimizer is a self-adjoint positive trace class operator, and our objective is to characterize its form. We will show that this minimizer is solution to a self-consistent nonlinear eigenvalue problem. One of the main difficulties in the proof is to parametrize the feasible set in order to derive the Euler-Lagrange equation, and we will proceed by constructing an appropriate form of perturbations of the minimizer. The question of deriving quantum statistical equilibria is at the heart of the quantum hydrody-namical models introduced by Degond and Ringhofer in [5]. An original feature of the problem is the local nature of constraints, i.e. they depend on position, while more classical models consider the total number of particles, the total current and the total energy in the system to be fixed.

math-ph↗

arXiv2019

Emergent flat band lattices in spatially periodic magnetic fields

Motivated by the recent discovery of Mott insulating phase and unconventional superconductivity due to the flat bands in twisted bilayer graphene, we propose more generic ways of getting two-dimensional (2D) emergent flat band lattices using either 2D Dirac materials or ordinary electron gas (2DEG) subject to moderate periodic orbital magnetic fields with zero spatial average. Employing both momentum-space and real-space numerical methods to solve the eigenvalue problems, we find stark contrast between Schrödinger and Dirac electrons, i.e., the former show recurring "magic" values of the magnetic field when the lowest band becomes flat, while for the latter the zero-energy bands are asymptotically flat without magicness. By examining the Wannier functions localized by the smooth periodic magnetic fields, we are able to explain these nontrivial behaviors using minimal tight-binding models on a square lattice. The two cases can be interpolated by varying the $g$-factor or effective mass of a 2DEG and by taking into account the Zeeman coupling, which also leads to flat bands with nonzero Chern numbers for each spin. Our work provides flexible platforms for exploring interaction-driven phases in 2D systems with on-demand superlattice symmetries.

cond-mat.mes-hall↗

arXiv2019

A constrained optimization problem in quantum statistical physics

In this paper, we consider the problem of minimizing quantum free energies under the constraint that the density of particles is fixed at each point of Rd, for any d $\ge$ 1. We are more particularly interested in the characterization of the minimizer, which is a self-adjoint nonnegative trace class operator, and will show that it is solution to a nonlinear self-consistent problem. This question of deriving quantum statistical equilibria is at the heart of the quantum hydrody-namical models introduced by Degond and Ringhofer. An original feature of the problem is the local nature of constraint, i.e. it depends on position, while more classical models consider the total number of particles in the system to be fixed. This raises difficulties in the derivation of the Euler-Lagrange equations and in the characterization of the minimizer, which are tackled in part by a careful parametrization of the feasible set.

math-ph↗