Development of a microelectronic module Final report

Feasibility of operating gallium arsenide devices in high temperature microelectronic circuit

Technology and benefits of aircraft counter rotation propellers

Results are reported of a NASA sponsored analytical investigation into the merits of advanced counter rotation propellers for Mach 0.80 commercial transport application. Propeller and gearbox performance, acoustics, vibration characteristics, weight, cost and maintenance requirements for a variety of design parameters and special features were considered. Fuel savings in the neighborhood of 8 percent relative to single rotation configurations are feasible through swirl recovery and lighter gearboxes. This is the net gain which includes a 5 percent acoustic treatment weight penalty to offset the broader frequency spectrum noise produced by counter rotation blading

Frustration and glassiness in spin models with cavity-mediated interactions

We show that the effective spin-spin interaction between three-level atoms confined in a multimode optical cavity is long-ranged and sign-changing, like the RKKY interaction; therefore, ensembles of such atoms subject to frozen-in positional randomness can realize spin systems having disordered and frustrated interactions. We argue that, whenever the atoms couple to sufficiently many cavity modes, the cavity-mediated interactions give rise to a spin glass. In addition, we show that the quantum dynamics of cavity-confined spin systems is that of a Bose-Hubbard model with strongly disordered hopping but no on-site disorder; this model exhibits a random-singlet glass phase, absent in conventional optical-lattice realizations. We briefly discuss experimental signatures of the realizable phases.Comment: 5 pages, 2 figure

Ferromagnetism in Correlated Electron Systems: Generalization of Nagaoka's Theorem

Nagaoka's theorem on ferromagnetism in the Hubbard model with one electron less than half filling is generalized to the case where all possible nearest-neighbor Coulomb interactions (the density-density interaction $V$, bond-charge interaction $X$, exchange interaction $F$, and hopping of double occupancies $F'$) are included. It is shown that for ferromagnetic exchange coupling ($F>0$) ground states with maximum spin are stable already at finite Hubbard interaction $U>U_c$. For non-bipartite lattices this requires a hopping amplitude $t\leq0$. For vanishing $F$ one obtains $U_c\to\infty$ as in Nagaoka's theorem. This shows that the exchange interaction $F$ is important for stabilizing ferromagnetism at finite $U$. Only in the special case $X=t$ the ferromagnetic state is stable even for $F=0$, provided the lattice allows the hole to move around loops.Comment: 13 pages, uuencoded postscript, includes 1 table and 2 figure

Carbon dioxide flux and net primary production of a boreal treed bog: Responses to warming and water-table-lowering simulations of climate change

Midlatitude treed bogs represent significant carbon (C) stocks and are highly sensitive to global climate change. In a dry continental treed bog, we compared three sites: control, recent (1–3 years; experimental) and older drained (10–13 years), with water levels at 38, 74 and 120 cm below the surface, respectively. At each site we measured carbon dioxide (CO2) fluxes and estimated tree root respiration (Rr; across hummock–hollow microtopography of the forest floor) and net primary production (NPP) of trees during the growing seasons (May to October) of 2011–2013. The CO2–C balance was calculated by adding the net CO2 exchange of the forest floor (NEff-Rr) to the NPP of the trees. From cooler and wetter 2011 to the driest and the warmest 2013, the control site was a CO2–C sink of 92, 70 and 76 g m−2, the experimental site was a CO2–C source of 14, 57 and 135 g m−2, and the drained site was a progressively smaller source of 26, 23 and 13 g CO2–C m−2. The short-term drainage at the experimental site resulted in small changes in vegetation coverage and large net CO2 emissions at the microforms. In contrast, the longer-term drainage and deeper water level at the drained site resulted in the replacement of mosses with vascular plants (shrubs) on the hummocks and lichen in the hollows leading to the highest CO2 uptake at the drained hummocks and significant losses in the hollows. The tree NPP (including above- and below-ground growth and litter fall) in 2011 and 2012 was significantly higher at the drained site (92 and 83 g C m−2) than at the experimental (58 and 55 g C m−2) and control (52 and 46 g C m−2) sites. We also quantified the impact of climatic warming at all water table treatments by equipping additional plots with open-top chambers (OTCs) that caused a passive warming on average of ~ 1 °C and differential air warming of ~ 6 °C at midday full sun over the study years. Warming significantly enhanced shrub growth and the CO2 sink function of the drained hummocks (exceeding the cumulative respiration losses in hollows induced by the lowered water level × warming). There was an interaction of water level with warming across hummocks that resulted in the largest net CO2 uptake at the warmed drained hummocks. Thus in 2013, the warming treatment enhanced the sink function of the control site by 13 g m−2, reduced the source function of the experimental by 10 g m−2 and significantly enhanced the sink function of the drained site by 73 g m−2. Therefore, drying and warming in continental bogs is expected to initially accelerate CO2–C losses via ecosystem respiration, but persistent drought and warming is expected to restore the peatland's original CO2–C sink function as a result of the shifts in vegetation composition and productivity between the microforms and increased NPP of trees over time

Cloning and characterisation of a maize carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase (ZmCCD1) and its involvement in the biosynthesis of apocarotenoids with various roles in mutualistic and parasitic interactions

Colonisation of maize roots by arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi leads to the accumulation of apocarotenoids (cyclohexenone and mycorradicin derivatives). Other root apocarotenoids (strigolactones) are involved in signalling during early steps of the AM symbiosis but also in stimulation of germination of parasitic plant seeds. Both apocarotenoid classes are predicted to originate from cleavage of a carotenoid substrate by a carotenoid cleavage dioxygenase (CCD), but the precursors and cleavage enzymes are unknown. A Zea mays CCD (ZmCCD1) was cloned by RT-PCR and characterised by expression in carotenoid accumulating E. coli strains and analysis of cleavage products using GC¿MS. ZmCCD1 efficiently cleaves carotenoids at the 9, 10 position and displays 78% amino acid identity to Arabidopsis thaliana CCD1 having similar properties. ZmCCD1 transcript levels were shown to be elevated upon root colonisation by AM fungi. Mycorrhization led to a decrease in seed germination of the parasitic plant Striga hermonthica as examined in a bioassay. ZmCCD1 is proposed to be involved in cyclohexenone and mycorradicin formation in mycorrhizal maize roots but not in strigolactone formatio

Effects of Next-Nearest-Neighbor Hopping on the Hole Motion in an Antiferromagnetic Background

In this paper we study the effect of next-nearest-neighbor hopping on the dynamics of a single hole in an antiferromagnetic (N\'{e}el) background. In the framework of large dimensions the Green function of a hole can be obtained exactly. The exact density of states of a hole is thus calculated in large dimensions and on a Bethe lattice with large coordination number. We suggest a physically motivated generalization to finite dimensions (e.g., 2 and 3). In $d=2$ we present also the momentum dependent spectral function. With varying degree, depending on the underlying lattice involved, the discrete spectrum for holes is replaced by a continuum background and a few resonances at the low energy end. The latter are the remanents of the bound states of the $t-J$ model. Their behavior is still largely governed by the parameters $t$ and $J$. The continuum excitations are more sensitive to the energy scales $t$ and $t_1$.Comment: To appear in Phys. Rev. B, Revtex, 23 pages, 10 figures available on request from [email protected]

Determining ethylene group disorder levels in κ\kappa-(BEDT-TTF)2_2Cu[N(CN)2_2]Br

We present a detailed structural investigation of the organic superconductor $\kappa$-(BEDT-TTF)$_2$Cu[N(CN)$_2$]Br at temperatures $T$ from 9 to 300 K. Anomalies in the $T$ dependence of the lattice parameters are associated with a glass-like transition previously reported at $T_g$ = 77 K. From structure refinements at 9, 100 and 300 K, the orthorhombic crystalline symmetry, space group {\it Pnma}, is established at all temperatures. Further, we extract the $T$ dependence of the occupation factor of the eclipsed conformation of the terminal ethylene groups of the BEDT-TTF molecule. At 300 K, we find 67(2) %, with an increase to 97(3) % at 9 K. We conclude that the glass-like transition is not primarily caused by configurational freezing-out of the ethylene groups

Robustness of a local Fermi Liquid against Ferromagnetism and Phase Separation

We study the properties of Fermi Liquids with the microscopic constraint of a local self-energy. In this case the forward scattering sum-rule imposes strong limitations on the Fermi-Liquid parameters, which rule out any Pomeranchek instabilities. For both attractive and repulsive interactions, ferromagnetism and phase separation are suppressed. Superconductivity is possible in an s-wave channel only. We also study the approach to the metal-insulator transition, and find a Wilson ratio approaching 2. This ratio and other properties of Sr_{1-x}La_xTiO_3 are all consistent with the local Fermi Liquid scenario.Comment: 4 pages (twocolumn format), can compile with or without epsf.sty latex style file -- Postscript files: fig1.ps and fig2.p

Propagation of a hole on a Neel background

We analyze the motion of a single hole on a N\'eel background, neglecting spin fluctuations. Brinkman and Rice studied this problem on a cubic lattice, introducing the retraceable-path approximation for the hole Green's function, exact in a one-dimensional lattice. Metzner et al. showed that the approximationalso becomes exact in the infinite-dimensional limit. We introduce a new approach to this problem by resumming the Nagaoka expansion of the propagator in terms of non-retraceable skeleton-paths dressed by retraceable-path insertions. This resummation opens the way to an almost quantitative solution of the problemin all dimensions and, in particular sheds new light on the question of the position of the band-edges. We studied the motion of the hole on a double chain and a square lattice, for which deviations from the retraceable-path approximation are expected to be most pronounced. The density of states is mostly adequately accounted for by the retra\-ce\-able-path approximation. Our band-edge determination points towards an absence of band tails extending to the Nagaoka energy in the spectrums of the double chain and the square lattice. We also evaluated the spectral density and the self-energy, exhibiting k-dependence due to finite dimensionality. We find good agreement with recent numerical results obtained by Sorella et al. with the Lanczos spectra decoding method. The method we employ enables us to identify the hole paths which are responsible for the various features present in the density of states and the spectral density.Comment: 26 pages,Revte