5,189 research outputs found

    Geometry dominated fluid adsorption on sculptured substrates

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    Experimental methods allow the shape and chemical composition of solid surfaces to be controlled at a mesoscopic level. Exposing such structured substrates to a gas close to coexistence with its liquid can produce quite distinct adsorption characteristics compared to that occuring for planar systems, which may well play an important role in developing technologies such as super-repellent surfaces or micro-fluidics. Recent studies have concentrated on adsorption of liquids at rough and heterogeneous substrates and the characterisation of nanoscopic liquid films. However, the fundamental effect of geometry has hardly been addressed. Here we show that varying the shape of the substrate can exert a profound influence on the adsorption isotherms allowing us to smoothly connect wetting and capillary condensation through a number of novel and distinct examples of fluid interfacial phenomena. This opens the possibility of tailoring the adsorption properties of solid substrates by sculpturing their surface shape.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figure

    The Spin Structure of the Nucleon

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    We present an overview of recent experimental and theoretical advances in our understanding of the spin structure of protons and neutrons.Comment: 84 pages, 29 figure

    Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides.

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    Structural symmetry-breaking plays a crucial role in determining the electronic band structures of two-dimensional materials. Tremendous efforts have been devoted to breaking the in-plane symmetry of graphene with electric fields on AB-stacked bilayers or stacked van der Waals heterostructures. In contrast, transition metal dichalcogenide monolayers are semiconductors with intrinsic in-plane asymmetry, leading to direct electronic bandgaps, distinctive optical properties and great potential in optoelectronics. Apart from their in-plane inversion asymmetry, an additional degree of freedom allowing spin manipulation can be induced by breaking the out-of-plane mirror symmetry with external electric fields or, as theoretically proposed, with an asymmetric out-of-plane structural configuration. Here, we report a synthetic strategy to grow Janus monolayers of transition metal dichalcogenides breaking the out-of-plane structural symmetry. In particular, based on a MoS2 monolayer, we fully replace the top-layer S with Se atoms. We confirm the Janus structure of MoSSe directly by means of scanning transmission electron microscopy and energy-dependent X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and prove the existence of vertical dipoles by second harmonic generation and piezoresponse force microscopy measurements

    Atomic-scale combination of germanium-zinc nanofibers for structural and electrochemical evolution

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    Alloys are recently receiving considerable attention in the community of rechargeable batteries as possible alternatives to carbonaceous negative electrodes; however, challenges remain for the practical utilization of these materials. Herein, we report the synthesis of germanium-zinc alloy nanofibers through electrospinning and a subsequent calcination step. Evidenced by in situ transmission electron microscopy and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy characterizations, this one-dimensional design possesses unique structures. Both germanium and zinc atoms are homogenously distributed allowing for outstanding electronic conductivity and high available capacity for lithium storage. The as-prepared materials present high rate capability (capacity of similar to 50% at 20 C compared to that at 0.2 C-rate) and cycle retention (73% at 3.0 C-rate) with a retaining capacity of 546 mAh g(-1) even after 1000 cycles. When assembled in a full cell, high energy density can be maintained during 400 cycles, which indicates that the current material has the potential to be used in a large-scale energy storage system

    Exploring the Higgs Portal with 10/fb at the LHC

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    We consider the impact of new exotic colored and/or charged matter interacting through the Higgs portal on Standard Model Higgs boson searches at the LHC. Such Higgs portal couplings can induce shifts in the effective Higgs-gluon-gluon and Higgs-photon-photon couplings, thus modifying the Higgs production and decay patterns. We consider two possible interpretations of the current LHC Higgs searches based on ~ 5/fb of data at each detector: 1) a Higgs boson in the mass range (124-126) GeV and 2) a `hidden' heavy Higgs boson which is underproduced due to the suppression of its gluon fusion production cross section. We first perform a model independent analysis of the allowed sizes of such shifts in light of the current LHC data. As a class of possible candidates for new physics which gives rise to such shifts, we investigate the effects of new scalar multiplets charged under the Standard Model gauge symmetries. We determine the scalar parameter space that is allowed by current LHC Higgs searches, and compare with complementary LHC searches that are sensitive to the direct production of colored scalar states.Comment: 27 pages, 11 figures; v2: references added, correction to scalar form factor, numerical results updated with Moriond 2012 data, conclusions unchange

    Brief Report: AIP Mutation in Pituitary Adenomas in the 18th Century and Today

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    From New England Journal of Medicine, Volume 364, issue 1, p.43-50. Copyright © (2011) Massachusetts Medical Society. Reprinted with permission.Gigantism results when a growth hormone–secreting pituitary adenoma is present before epiphyseal fusion. In 1909, when Harvey Cushing examined the skeleton of an Irish patient who lived from 1761 to 1783,1-3 he noted an enlarged pituitary fossa. We extracted DNA from the patient’s teeth and identified a germline mutation in the aryl hydrocarbon–interacting protein gene (AIP). Four contemporary Northern Irish families who presented with gigantism, acromegaly, or prolactinoma have the same mutation and haplotype associated with the mutated gene. Using coalescent theory, we infer that these persons share a common ancestor who lived about 57 to 66 generations earlier

    High Definition Video Compression Using Saliency Features

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    High Definition (HD) devices requires HD-videos for the effective uses of HD devices. However, it consists of some issues such as high storage capacity, limited battery power of high definition devices, long encoding time, and high computational complexity when it comes to the transmission, broadcasting and internet traffic. Many existing techniques consists these above-mentioned issues. Therefore, there is a need of an efficient technique, which reduces unnecessary amount of space, provides high compression rate and requires low bandwidth spectrum. Therefore, in the paper we have introduced an efficient video compression technique as modified HEVC coding based on saliency features to counter these existing drawbacks. We highlight first, on extracting features on the raw data and then compressed it largely. This technique makes our model powerful and provides effective performance in terms of compression. Our experiment results proves that our model provide better efficiency in terms of average PSNR, MSE and bitrate. Our experimental results outperforms all the existing techniques in terms of saliency map detection, AUC, NSS, KLD and JSD. The average AUC, NSS and KLD value by our proposed method are 0.846, 1.702 and 0.532 respectively which is very high compare to other existing technique

    Multicolour correlative imaging using phosphor probes

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    Correlative light and electron microscopy exploits the advantages of optical methods, such as multicolour probes and their use in hydrated live biological samples, to locate functional units, which are then correlated with structural details that can be revealed by the superior resolution of electron microscopes. One difficulty is locating the area imaged by the electron beam in the much larger optical field of view. Multifunctional probes that can be imaged in both modalities and thus register the two images are required. Phosphor materials give cathodoluminescence (CL) optical emissions under electron excitation. Lanthanum phosphate containing thulium or terbium or europium emits narrow bands in the blue, green and red regions of the CL spectrum; they may be synthesised with very uniform-sized crystals in the 10- to 50-nm range. Such crystals can be imaged by CL in the electron microscope, at resolutions limited by the particle size, and with colour discrimination to identify different probes. These materials also give emissions in the optical microscope, by multiphoton excitation. They have been deposited on the surface of glioblastoma cells and imaged by CL. Gadolinium oxysulphide doped with terbium emits green photons by either ultraviolet or electron excitation. Sixty-nanometre crystals of this phosphor have been imaged in the atmospheric scanning electron microscope (JEOL ClairScope). This probe and microscope combination allow correlative imaging in hydrated samples. Phosphor probes should prove to be very useful in correlative light and electron microscopy, as fiducial markers to assist in image registration, and in high/super resolution imaging studies

    Real-Time Video Scaling Based on Convolution Neural Network Architecture

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    In recent years, video super resolution techniques becomes mandatory requirements to get high resolution videos. Many super resolution techniques researched but still video super resolution or scaling is a vital challenge. In this paper, we have presented a real-time video scaling based on convolution neural network architecture to eliminate the blurriness in the images and video frames and to provide better reconstruction quality while scaling of large datasets from lower resolution frames to high resolution frames. We compare our outcomes with multiple exiting algorithms. Our extensive results of proposed technique RemCNN (Reconstruction error minimization Convolution Neural Network) shows that our model outperforms the existing technologies such as bicubic, bilinear, MCResNet and provide better reconstructed motioning images and video frames. The experimental results shows that our average PSNR result is 47.80474 considering upscale-2, 41.70209 for upscale-3 and 36.24503 for upscale-4 for Myanmar dataset which is very high in contrast to other existing techniques. This results proves our proposed model real-time video scaling based on convolution neural network architecture’s high efficiency and better performance
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