Effect of Thiols for Nitrogen Reduction to Ammonia

Ammonia is an important chemical used for fertilizers and also a potential carbon-free hydrogen storage medium. The Haber-Bosch process is the main production process, which requires large energy- and capital-input. Therefore, it is crucial to develop an alternate scalable synthesis that provides a less energy intensive and more economical route for synthetic ammonia production. In this paper, a 1Fe1Ni film was functionalized with C3OH and C6OH for the electrochemical synthesis of ammonia. This work will provide some insight into how thiol ligands can increase the selectivity of the catalyst for nitrogen reduction reaction and can be improved on to provide a new synthesis for ammonia

Statement By The Honorable Gerald R. Ford Minority Leader of The House of Representatives Before The House Committee on the Judiciary

Prepared remarks of Gerald Ford to the House Committee on the Judiciary on the first day of the committee’s hearings to consider Ford’s nomination to be 40th Vice President of the United. President Richard Nixon had nominated Ford pursuant to Section 2 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment following Vice President Spiro Agnew’s resignation.https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/twentyfifth_amendment_watergate_era/1005/thumbnail.jp

Exact solution of the Hu-Paz-Zhang master equation

The Hu-Paz-Zhang equation is a master equation for an oscillator coupled to a linear passive bath. It is exact within the assumption that the oscillator and bath are initially uncoupled . Here an exact general solution is obtained in the form of an expression for the Wigner function at time t in terms of the initial Wigner function. The result is applied to the motion of a Gaussian wave packet and to that of a pair of such wave packets. A serious divergence arising from the assumption of an initially uncoupled state is found to be due to the zero-point oscillations of the bath and not removed in a cutoff model. As a consequence, worthwhile results for the equation can only be obtained in the high temperature limit, where zero-point oscillations are neglected. In that limit closed form expressions for wave packet spreading and attenuation of coherence are obtained. These results agree within a numerical factor with those appearing in the literature, which apply for the case of a particle at zero temperature that is suddenly coupled to a bath at high temperature. On the other hand very different results are obtained for the physically consistent case in which the initial particle temperature is arranged to coincide with that of the bath

Note on the derivative of the hyperbolic cotangent

In a letter to Nature (Ford G W and O'Connell R F 1996 Nature 380 113) we presented a formula for the derivative of the hyperbolic cotangent that differs from the standard one in the literature by an additional term proportional to the Dirac delta function. Since our letter was necessarily brief, shortly after its appearance we prepared a more extensive unpublished note giving a detailed explanation of our argument. Since this note has been referenced in a recent article (Estrada R and Fulling S A 2002 J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 35 3079) we think it appropriate that it now appear in print. We have made no alteration to the original note

A pair of oscillators interacting with a common heat bath

Here the problem considered is that of a pair of oscillators coupled to a common heat bath. Many, if not most, discussions of a single operator coupled to a bath have used the independent oscillator model of the bath. However, that model has no notion of separation, so the question of phenomena when the oscillators are near one another compared with when they are widely separated cannot be addressed. Here the Lamb model of an oscillator attached to a stretched string is generalized to illustrate some of these questions. The coupled Langevin equations for a pair of oscillators attached to the string at different points are derived and their limits for large and small separations obtained. Finally, as an illustration of a different phenomenon, the fluctuation force between a pair of masses attached to the string is calculated, with closed form expressions for the force at small and large separations

Wave Packet Spreading: Temperature and Squeezing Effects with Applications to Quantum Measurement and Decoherence

A localized free particle is represented by a wave packet and its motion is discussed in most quantum mechanics textbooks. Implicit in these discussions is the assumption of zero temperature. We discuss how the effects of finite temperature and squeezing can be incorporated in an elementary manner. The results show how the introduction of simple tools and ideas can bring the reader into contact with topics at the frontiers of research in quantum mechanics. We discuss the standard quantum limit, which is of interest in the measurement of small forces, and decoherence of a mixed (``Schrodinger cat'') state, which has implications for current research in quantum computation, entanglement, and the quantum-classical interface

Lorentz Transformation of Blackbody Radiation

We present a simple calculation of the Lorentz transformation of the spectral distribution of blackbody radiation at temperature T. Here we emphasize that T is the temperature in the blackbody rest frame and does not change. We thus avoid the confused and confusing question of how temperature transforms. We show by explicit calculation that at zero temperature the spectral distribution is invariant. At finite temperature we find the well known result familiar in discussions of the the 2.7! K cosmic radiation.Comment: 6 page

Quantum thermodynamic functions for an oscillator coupled to a heat bath

Small systems (of interest in the areas of nanophysics, quantum information, etc.) are particularly vulnerable to environmental effects. Thus, we determine various thermodynamic functions for an oscillator in an arbitrary heat bath at arbitrary temperatures. Explicit results are presented for the most commonly discussed heat bath models: Ohmic, single relaxation time and blackbody radiation.Comment: Phys. Rev. B, in pres

Decoherence in Phase Space

Much of the discussion of decoherence has been in terms of a particle moving in one dimension that is placed in an initial superposition state (a Schr\"{o}dinger "cat" state) corresponding to two widely separated wave packets. Decoherence refers to the destruction of the interference term in the quantum probability function. Here, we stress that a quantitative measure of decoherence depends not only on the specific system being studied but also on whether one is considering coordinate, momentum or phase space. We show that this is best illustrated by considering Wigner phase space where the measure is again different. Analytic results for the time development of the Wigner distribution function for a two-Gaussian Schrodinger "cat" state have been obtained in the high-temperature limit (where decoherence can occur even for negligible dissipation) which facilitates a simple demonstration of our remarks.Comment: in press in Laser Phys.13(2003