Nanocellulose aerogel-based porous coaxial fibers for thermal insulation

Strong, continuous, and highly porous coaxial fibers with cellulose nanofibril (CNF) aerogel core and cellulose-rich sheath were fabricated by wet-spinning hollow fibers and infusing them with aerogel precursor for high-performance thermal insulators. The sheath contained multiscale pores, including microvoids (14.5 μm) and sub-micron pores (133 nm) in bulk, as well as ca. 25–26 nm surface nanopores, to function as a template and protective sheath for the microporous CNF aerogel core. The porous coaxial fibers had many desirable qualities, including low density (0.2 g cm3), high porosity (85%), high specific tensile strength (23.5 ± 2.5 MPa g cm−3), wide working temperatures (−20 to 150 °C), continuous and large-scale producibility, as well as biodegradability. The unique combination of multiscale porous sheath and ultra-low density aerogel core synergistically minimizes heat conductivity by all three mechanisms, i.e., restrain air circulation to limit convective heat transfer, while the poor conducting cellulose permitting little conductive heat transfer and the highly crystalline aerogel cellular walls prohibit infrared radiation, effectively suppresses radiative heat transfer under extreme temperatures

Amphiphilic Protein Microfibrils from Ice-Templated Self-Assembly and Disassembly of Pickering Emulsions

Amphiphilic protein microfibrils have been generated for the first time by ice-templated self-assembly of aqueous globular protein colloids and subsequent selective disassembly in polar solvents like MeOH, EtOH, acetone, and dimethylformamide. Semicrystalline microfibrils, ca. 1.2 μm wide and 45-70 μm long, produced from soy proteins are excellent amphiphiles, which are capable of stabilizing both high-internal-phase o/w and w1/o/w2 double emulsions as well as retaining amphiphilicity even with surface-bound lipophiles and electrophiles. This ice-templated self-assembling and polar solvent disassembling approach is applicable to other legume proteins, such as pea proteins, and is scalable to process globular proteins into amphiphilic microfibrils for Pickering emulsions in many potential applications including food, pharmaceuticals and skin care

Passive PT -symmetric couplers without complex optical potentials

© 2015 American Physical Society. In addition to the implementation of parity-time-(PT-) symmetric optical systems by carefully and actively controlling the gain and loss, we show that a 2×2 PT-symmetric Hamiltonian has a unitarily equivalent representation without complex optical potentials in the resulting optical coupler. Through the Naimark dilation in operator algebra, passive PT-symmetric couplers can thus be implemented with a refractive index of real values and asymmetric coupling coefficients. This opens up the possibility to implement general PT-symmetric systems with state-of-the-art asymmetric slab waveguides, dissimilar optical fibers, or cavities with chiral mirrors

Gait analyses of parkinson’s disease patients using multiscale entropy

Copyright: © 2021 by the author(s). Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a type of neurodegenerative diseases. PD influences gait in many aspects: reduced gait speed and step length, increased axial rigidity, and impaired rhythmicity. Gait-related data used in this study are from PhysioNet. Twenty-one PD patients and five healthy controls (CO) were sorted into four groups: PD without task (PDw), PD with dual task (PDd), control without task (COw), and control with dual task (COd). Since dual task actions are attention demanding, either gait or cognitive function may be affected. To quantify the used walking data, eight pressure sensors installed in each insole are used to measure the vertical ground reaction force. Thus, quantitative measurement analysis is performed utilizing multiscale entropy (MSE) and complexity index (CI) to analyze and differentiate between the ground reaction force of the four different groups. Results show that the CI of patients with PD is higher than that of CO and 11 of the sensor signals are statistically significant (p < 0.05). The COd group has larger CI values at the beginning (p = 0.021) but they get lower at the end of the test (p = 0.000) compared to that in the COw group. The end-of-test CI for the PDw group is lower in one of the feet sensor signals, and in the right total ground reaction force compared to the PDd group counterparts. In conclusion, when people start to adjust their gait due to pathology or stress, CI may increase first and reach a peak, but it decreases afterward when stress or pathology is further increased

Rice Straw Cellulose Nanofibrils via Aqueous Counter Collision and Differential Centrifugation and Their Self-Assembled Structures

Rice straw cellulose was completely defibrillated via aqueous counter collision (ACC) at a low energy input of 15 kWh/kg, then fractionated by differential centrifugation into four increasing weight fractions of progressively thinner cellulose nanofibrils (CNFs): 6.9% in 80-200 nm, 14.4% in 20-80 nm, 20.3% in 5-20 nm, and 58.4% in less than 5 nm thickness. The 93.1% less than 80 nm or 78.7% less than 20 nm thick CNFs yields were more than double those from wood pulp by other mechanical means but at a lower energy input. The smallest (3.7 nm thick and 5.5 nm wide) CNFs were only a third or less in lateral dimensions than those obatined through ACC processed from wood pulp, bamboo, and microbial cellulose pellicle. The less than 20 nm thick CNFs could self-assemble into continuous submicron (136 nm) wide fibers by freezing and freeze-drying or semitransparent (13-42% optical transmittance) film by ultrafiltration and air-drying with excellent mechanical properties (164 MPa tensile strength, 4 GPa Young's modulus, and 16% strain at break). ACC defibrillated CNFs retained essentially the same chemical and crystalline structures and thermal stability as the original rice straw cellulose and therefore were much more thermally stable than TEMPO oxidized CNFs and sulfuric acid hydrolyzed cellulose nanocrystals from the same rice straw cellulose

Band structure engineering in (Bi1-xSbx)2Te3 ternary topological insulators

Three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators (TI) are novel quantum materials with insulating bulk and topologically protected metallic surfaces with Dirac-like band structure. The spin-helical Dirac surface states are expected to host exotic topological quantum effects and find applications in spintronics and quantum computation. The experimental realization of these ideas requires fabrication of versatile devices based on bulk-insulating TIs with tunable surface states. The main challenge facing the current TI materials exemplified by Bi2Se3 and Bi2Te3 is the significant bulk conduction, which remains unsolved despite extensive efforts involving nanostructuring, chemical doping and electrical gating. Here we report a novel approach for engineering the band structure of TIs by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) growth of (Bi1-xSbx)2Te3 ternary compounds. Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES) and transport measurements show that the topological surface states exist over the entire composition range of (Bi1-xSbx)2Te3 (x = 0 to 1), indicating the robustness of bulk Z2 topology. Most remarkably, the systematic band engineering leads to ideal TIs with truly insulating bulk and tunable surface state across the Dirac point that behave like one quarter of graphene. This work demonstrates a new route to achieving intrinsic quantum transport of the topological surface states and designing conceptually new TI devices with well-established semiconductor technology.Comment: Minor changes in title, text and figures. Supplementary information adde

Coexistence of the topological state and a two-dimensional electron gas on the surface of Bi2Se3

Topological insulators are a recently discovered class of materials with fascinating properties: While the inside of the solid is insulating, fundamental symmetry considerations require the surfaces to be metallic. The metallic surface states show an unconventional spin texture, electron dynamics and stability. Recently, surfaces with only a single Dirac cone dispersion have received particular attention. These are predicted to play host to a number of novel physical phenomena such as Majorana fermions, magnetic monopoles and unconventional superconductivity. Such effects will mostly occur when the topological surface state lies in close proximity to a magnetic or electric field, a (superconducting) metal, or if the material is in a confined geometry. Here we show that a band bending near to the surface of the topological insulator Bi$_2$Se$_3$ gives rise to the formation of a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). The 2DEG, renowned from semiconductor surfaces and interfaces where it forms the basis of the integer and fractional quantum Hall effects, two-dimensional superconductivity, and a plethora of practical applications, coexists with the topological surface state in Bi$_2$Se$_3$. This leads to the unique situation where a topological and a non-topological, easily tunable and potentially superconducting, metallic state are confined to the same region of space.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figure

The space group classification of topological band insulators

Topological band insulators (TBIs) are bulk insulating materials which feature topologically protected metallic states on their boundary. The existing classification departs from time-reversal symmetry, but the role of the crystal lattice symmetries in the physics of these topological states remained elusive. Here we provide the classification of TBIs protected not only by time-reversal, but also by crystalline symmetries. We find three broad classes of topological states: (a) Gamma-states robust against general time-reversal invariant perturbations; (b) Translationally-active states protected from elastic scattering, but susceptible to topological crystalline disorder; (c) Valley topological insulators sensitive to the effects of non-topological and crystalline disorder. These three classes give rise to 18 different two-dimensional, and, at least 70 three-dimensional TBIs, opening up a route for the systematic search for new types of TBIs.Comment: Accepted in Nature Physic

Ultra-low carrier concentration and surface dominant transport in Sb-doped Bi2Se3 topological insulator nanoribbons

A topological insulator is a new state of matter, possessing gapless spin-locking surface states across the bulk band gap which has created new opportunities from novel electronics to energy conversion. However, the large concentration of bulk residual carriers has been a major challenge for revealing the property of the topological surface state via electron transport measurement. Here we report surface state dominated transport in Sb-doped Bi2Se3 nanoribbons with very low bulk electron concentrations. In the nanoribbons with sub-10nm thickness protected by a ZnO layer, we demonstrate complete control of their top and bottom surfaces near the Dirac point, achieving the lowest carrier concentration of 2x10^11/cm2 reported in three-dimensional (3D) topological insulators. The Sb-doped Bi2Se3 nanostructures provide an attractive materials platform to study fundamental physics in topological insulators, as well as future applications.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl