Megasonic Enhanced Electrodeposition

A novel way of filling high aspect ratio vertical interconnection (microvias) with an aspect ratio of >2:1 is presented. High frequency acoustic streaming at megasonic frequencies enables the decrease of the Nernst-diffusion layer down to the sub-micron range, allowing thereby conformal electrodeposition in deep grooves. Higher throughput and better control over the deposition properties are possible for the manufacturing of interconnections and metal-based MEMS.Comment: Submitted on behalf of EDA Publishing Association (http://irevues.inist.fr/handle/2042/16838

Reverse engineering of CAD models via clustering and approximate implicitization

In applications like computer aided design, geometric models are often represented numerically as polynomial splines or NURBS, even when they originate from primitive geometry. For purposes such as redesign and isogeometric analysis, it is of interest to extract information about the underlying geometry through reverse engineering. In this work we develop a novel method to determine these primitive shapes by combining clustering analysis with approximate implicitization. The proposed method is automatic and can recover algebraic hypersurfaces of any degree in any dimension. In exact arithmetic, the algorithm returns exact results. All the required parameters, such as the implicit degree of the patches and the number of clusters of the model, are inferred using numerical approaches in order to obtain an algorithm that requires as little manual input as possible. The effectiveness, efficiency and robustness of the method are shown both in a theoretical analysis and in numerical examples implemented in Python

Room temperature dynamic correlation between methylammonium molecules in lead-iodine based perovskites: An ab-initio molecular dynamics perspective

The high efficiency of lead organo-metal-halide perovskite solar cells has raised many questions about the role of the methylammonium (MA) molecules in the Pb-I framework. Experiments indicate that the MA molecules are able to 'freely' spin around at room temperature even though they carry an intrinsic dipole moment. We have performed large supercell (2592 atoms) finite temperature ab-initio molecular dynamics calculations to study the correlation between the molecules in the framework. An underlying long range anti-ferroelectric ordering of the molecular dipoles is observed. The dynamical correlation between neighboring molecules shows a maximum around room temperature in the mid-temperature phase. In this phase, the rotations are slow enough to (partially) couple to neighbors via the Pb-I cage. This results in a collective motion of neighboring molecules in which the cage acts as the mediator. At lower and higher temperatures the motions are less correlated

Response to Friedman

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Lepton asymmetry and primordial nucleosynthesis in the era of precision cosmology

We calculate and display the primordial light-element abundances as a function of a neutrino degeneracy parameter \xi common to all flavors. It is the only unknown parameter characterizing the thermal medium at the primordial nucleosynthesis epoch. The observed primordial helium abundance Y_p is the most sensitive cosmic ``leptometer.'' Adopting the conservative Y_p error analysis of Olive and Skillman implies -0.04 \alt \xi \alt 0.07 whereas the errors stated by Izotov and Thuan imply \xi=0.0245+-0.0092 (1 sigma). Improved determinations of the baryon abundance have no significant impact on this situation. A determination of Y_p that reliably distinguishes between a vanishing or nonvanishing \xi is a crucial test of the cosmological standard assumption that sphaleron effects equilibrate the cosmic lepton and baryon asymmetries.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures; minor changes, references added, replaced to match the published version in PRD (Brief Reports

The Shape of Covariantly Smeared Sources in Lattice QCD

Covariantly smeared sources are commonly used in lattice QCD to enhance the projection onto the ground state. Here we investigate the dependence of their shape on the gauge field background and find that the presence of localized concentrations of magnetic field can lead to strong distortions which reduce the smearing radii achievable by iterative smearing prescriptions. In particular, as $a\to 0$, iterative procedures like Jacobi smearing require increasingly large iteration counts in order to reach physically-sized smearing radii $r_{sm}\sim$ 0.5 fm, and the resulting sources are strongly distorted. To bypass this issue, we propose a covariant smearing procedure (``free-form smearing'') that allows us to create arbitrarily shaped sources, including in particular Gaussians of arbitrary radius.Comment: 1+15 pages, 7 figures (24 pdf images

Chaos in networks of coupled oscillators with multimodal natural frequency distributions

We explore chaos in the Kuramoto model with multimodal distributions of the natural frequencies of oscillators and provide a comprehensive description under what conditions chaos occurs. For a natural frequency distribution with $M$ peaks it is typical that there is a range of coupling strengths such that oscillators belonging to each peak form a synchronized cluster, but the clusters do not globally synchronize. We use collective coordinates to describe the inter- and intra-cluster dynamics, which reduces the Kuramoto model to $2M-1$ degrees of freedom. We show that under some assumptions, there is a time-scale splitting between the slow intracluster dynamics and fast intercluster dynamics, which reduces the collective coordinate model to an $M-1$ degree of freedom rescaled Kuramoto model. Therefore, four or more clusters are required to yield the three degrees of freedom necessary for chaos. However, the time-scale splitting breaks down if a cluster intermittently desynchronizes. We show that this intermittent desynchronization provides a mechanism for chaos for trimodal natural frequency distributions. In addition, we use collective coordinates to show analytically that chaos cannot occur for bimodal frequency distributions, even if they are asymmetric and if intermittent desynchronization occurs

N=1 supersymmetric Yang-Mills theory on the lattice

Numerical simulations of supersymmetric theories on the lattice are intricate and challenging with respect to their theoretical foundations and algorithmic realisation. Nevertheless, the simulations of a four-dimensional supersymmetric gauge theory have made considerable improvements over the recent years. In this contribution we summarise the results of our collaboration concerning the mass spectrum of this theory. The investigation of systematic errors allows now a more precise estimate concerning the expected formation of supersymmetric multiplets of the lightest particles. These multiplets contain flavour singlet mesons, glueballs, and an additional fermionic state.Comment: presented at the 31st International Symposium on Lattice Field Theory (Lattice 2013), 29 July - 3 August 2013, Mainz, German