Ultrahigh areal number density solid-state on-chip microsupercapacitors via electrohydrodynamic jet printing

Microsupercapacitors (MSCs) have garnered considerable attention as a promising power source for microelectronics and miniaturized portable/wearable devices. However, their practical application has been hindered by the manufacturing complexity and dimensional limits. Here, we develop a new class of ultrahigh areal number density solid-state MSCs (UHD SS-MSCs) on a chip via electrohydrodynamic (EHD) jet printing. This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first study to exploit EHD jet printing in the MSCs. The activated carbon-based electrode inks are EHD jet-printed, creating interdigitated electrodes with fine feature sizes. Subsequently, a drying-free, ultraviolet-cured solid-state gel electrolyte is introduced to ensure electrochemical isolation between the SS-MSCs, enabling dense SS-MSC integration with on-demand (in-series/in-parallel) cell connection on a chip. The resulting on-chip UHD SS-MSCs exhibit exceptional areal number density [36 unit cells integrated on a chip (area = 8.0 mm x 8.2 mm), 54.9 cells cm(-2)] and areal operating voltage (65.9 V cm(-2))

Faraday Rotation Measure Synthesis of intermediate redshift quasars as a probe of intervening matter

There is evidence that magnetized material along the line of sight to distant quasars is detectable in the polarization properties of the background sources. The polarization properties appear to be correlated with the presence of intervening MgII absorption, which is thought to arise in outflowing material from star forming galaxies. In order to investigate this further, we have obtained high spectral resolution polarization measurements, with the VLA and ATCA, of a set of 49 unresolved quasars for which we have high quality optical spectra. These enable us to produce a Faraday Depth spectrum for each source, using Rotation Measure Synthesis. Our new independent radio data confirms that interveners are strongly associated with depolarization. We characterize the complexity of the Faraday Depth spectrum using a number of parameters and show how these are related, or not, to the depolarization and to the presence of MgII absorption along the line of sight. We argue that complexity and structure in the Faraday Depth distribution likely arise from both intervening material and intrinsically to the background source and attempt to separate these. We find that the strong radio depolarization effects associated with intervening material at redshifts out to $z \approx 1$ arise from inhomogeneous Faraday screens producing a dispersion in Rotation Measure across individual sources of around 10~rad/m$^2$. This is likely produced by disordered fields with strengths of at least $3\;\mu$G.Comment: 21 pages, 14 figure

The Connection between Star-Forming Galaxies, AGN Host Galaxies and Early-Type Galaxies in the SDSS

We present a study of the connection between star-forming galaxies, AGN host galaxies, and normal early-type galaxies in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). Using the SDSS DR5 and DR4plus data, we select our early-type galaxy sample in the color versus color-gradient space, and we classify the spectral types of the selected early-type galaxies into normal, star-forming, Seyfert, and LINER classes, using several spectral line flux ratios. We investigate the slope in the fundamental space for each class of early-type galaxies and find that there are obvious differences in the slopes of the fundamental planes (FPs) among the different classes of early-type galaxies, in the sense that the slopes for Seyferts and star-forming galaxies are flatter than those for normal galaxies and LINERs. This may be the first identification of the systematic variation of the FP slope among the subclasses of early-type galaxies. The difference in the FP slope might be caused by the difference in the degree of nonhomology among different classes or by the difference of gas contents in their merging progenitors. One possible scenario is that the AGN host galaxies and star-forming galaxies are formed by gas-rich merging and that they may evolve into normal early-type galaxies after finishing their star formation or AGN activities.Comment: 5 pages with emulateapj, 2 figures, accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal Letter

Interspecific competition underlying mutualistic networks

The architecture of bipartite networks linking two classes of constituents is affected by the interactions within each class. For the bipartite networks representing the mutualistic relationship between pollinating animals and plants, it has been known that their degree distributions are broad but often deviate from power-law form, more significantly for plants than animals. Here we consider a model for the evolution of the mutualistic networks and find that their topology is strongly dependent on the asymmetry and non-linearity of the preferential selection of mutualistic partners. Real-world mutualistic networks analyzed in the framework of the model show that a new animal species determines its partners not only by their attractiveness but also as a result of the competition with pre-existing animals, which leads to the stretched-exponential degree distributions of plant species.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, accepted version in PR

Modified embedded-atom method interatomic potentials for the Mg-Al alloy system

We developed new modified embedded-atom method (MEAM) interatomic potentials for the Mg-Al alloy system using a first-principles method based on density functional theory (DFT). The materials parameters, such as the cohesive energy, equilibrium atomic volume, and bulk modulus, were used to determine the MEAM parameters. Face-centered cubic, hexagonal close packed, and cubic rock salt structures were used as the reference structures for Al, Mg, and MgAl, respectively. The applicability of the new MEAM potentials to atomistic simulations for investigating Mg-Al alloys was demonstrated by performing simulations on Mg and Al atoms in a variety of geometries. The new MEAM potentials were used to calculate the adsorption energies of Al and Mg atoms on Al (111) and Mg (0001) surfaces. The formation energies and geometries of various point defects, such as vacancies, interstitial defects and substitutional defects, were also calculated. We found that the new MEAM potentials give a better overall agreement with DFT calculations and experiments when compared against the previously published MEAM potentials.Comment: Fixed a referenc