Infrared Spectra of Meteoritic SiC Grains

We present here the first infrared spectra of meteoritic SiC grains. The mid-infrared transmission spectra of meteoritic SiC grains isolated from the Murchison meteorite were measured in the wavelength range 2.5--16.5 micron, in order to make available the optical properties of presolar SiC grains. These grains are most likely stellar condensates with an origin predominately in carbon stars. Measurements were performed on two different extractions of presolar SiC from the Murchison meteorite. The two samples show very different spectral appearance due to different grain size distributions. The spectral feature of the smaller meteoritic SiC grains is a relatively broad absorption band found between the longitudinal and transverse lattice vibration modes around 11.3 micron, supporting the current interpretation about the presence of SiC grains in carbon stars. In contrast to this, the spectral feature of the large (> 5 micron) grains has an extinction minimum around 10 micron. The obtained spectra are compared with commercially available SiC grains and the differences are discussed. This comparison shows that the crystal structure (e.g., beta-SiC versus alpha-SiC) of SiC grains plays a minor role on the optical signature of SiC grains compared to e.g. grain size.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures. To appear in A&

Heat Treated NiP–SiC Composite Coatings: Elaboration and Tribocorrosion Behaviour in NaCl Solution

Tribocorrosion behaviour of heat-treated NiP and NiP–SiC composite coatings was investigated in a 0.6 M NaCl solution. The tribocorrosion tests were performed in a linear sliding tribometer with an electrochemical cell interface. It was analyzed the influence of SiC particles dispersion in the NiP matrix on current density developed, on coefficient of friction and on wear volume loss. The results showed that NiP–SiC composite coatings had a lower wear volume loss compared to NiP coatings. However, the incorporation of SiC particles into the metallic matrix affects the current density developed by the system during the tribocorrosion test. It was verified that not only the volume of co-deposited particles (SiC vol.%) but also the number of SiC particles per coating area unit (and consequently the SiC particles size) have made influence on the tribocorrosion behaviour of NiP–SiC composite coatings

Origin of layer number dependent linear and nonlinear optical properties of two-dimensional graphene-like SiC

We theoretically discuss the physical origin of the dielectric constants [{\epsilon}({\omega})] and second harmonic generation coefficients [\{chi}(2)({\omega})] of the ABA-stacked two-dimensional graphene-like silicon carbide (2D-SiC) with the number of layers up to 5. It is found that the intensities of the pronounced peaks of both {\epsilon}({\omega}) and \{chi}(2)({\omega}) exhibit a clear layer number dependence. For the light polarization parallel to the 2DSiC plane, the monolayer SiC (ML-SiC) and multilayer SiC (MuL-SiC) have very similar pronounced peak positions of {\epsilon}({\omega}), which are attributed to the {\pi}->{\pi}* and {\sigma}->{\sigma}* transitions. However, for the light polarization perpendicular to the 2D-SiC plane, a characteristic peak is found for the MuL-SiC at about 4.0 eV, except that the allowed {\pi}->{\sigma}* and {\sigma}->{\pi}* transition peaks are found for both ML-SiC and MuL-SiC in the high-energy region (> 8 eV). This characteristic peak is attributed to the interlayer {\pi}->{\pi}* transition which does not exist for the ML-SiC, and at this peak position, the ML-SiC has a weak dark exciton based on the mBJ calculation within the Bethe-Salpeter equation framework. For \{chi}(2)({\omega}), the single-particle transition channels based on the three-band terms dominate the second harmonic generation process of both ML-SiC and MuL-SiC and determine the size and sign of \{chi}(2)({\omega}). In the ultraviolet visible region, the purely interband motion and intraband motion of electrons competitively determine the size and sign of \{chi}(2)({\omega}). For the light polarization perpendicular to the 2D-SiC plane, the intraband motion of electrons modulated more dramatically the interband motion than for that parallel to the 2D-SiC plane.Comment: 34 pages, 10 figures, 3 table

Atomistic aspects of ductile responses of cubic silicon carbide during nanometric cutting

Cubic silicon carbide (SiC) is an extremely hard and brittle material having unique blend of material properties which makes it suitable candidate for microelectromechanical systems and nanoelectromechanical systems applications. Although, SiC can be machined in ductile regime at nanoscale through single-point diamond turning process, the root cause of the ductile response of SiC has not been understood yet which impedes significant exploitation of this ceramic material. In this paper, molecular dynamics simulation has been carried out to investigate the atomistic aspects of ductile response of SiC during nanometric cutting process. Simulation results show that cubic SiC undergoes sp3-sp2 order-disorder transition resulting in the formation of SiC-graphene-like substance with a growth rate dependent on the cutting conditions. The disorder transition of SiC causes the ductile response during its nanometric cutting operations. It was further found out that the continuous abrasive action between the diamond tool and SiC causes simultaneous sp3-sp2 order-disorder transition of diamond tool which results in graphitization of diamond and consequent tool wear

Effect of processing on fracture toughness of silicon carbide as determined by Vickers indentations

Several alpha-SiC materials were processed by hot isostatic pressing (HIPing) and by sintering an alpha-SiC powder containing boron and carbon. Several beta-SiC materials were processed by HIPing a beta-SiC powder with boron and carbon additions. The fracture toughnesses K(sub 1c) of these beta- and alpha-SiC materials were estimated from measurements of Vickers indentations. The three formulas used to estimate K(sub 1c) from the indentation fracture patterns resulted in three ranges of K(sub 1c) estimates. Furthermore, each formula measured the effects of processing differently. All three estimates indicated that fine-grained HIPed alpha-SiC has a higher K(sub 1c) than coarsed-grained sintered alpha-SiC. Hot isostatically pressed beta-SiC, which had an ultrafine grain structure, exhibited a K(sub 1c) comparable to that of HIPed alpha-SiC

Optical properties of SiC nanotubes: A systematic ab initio\textit{ab initio} study

The band structure and optical dielectric function $\epsilon$ of single-walled zigzag [(3,0),(4,0),(5,0),(6,0),(8,0),(9,0),(12,0),(16,0),(20,0),(24,0)], armchair [(3,3),(4,4),(5,5),(8,8),(12,12),(15,15)], and chiral [(4,2),(6,2),(8,4),(10,4)] SiC-NTs as well as the single honeycomb SiC sheet have been calculated within DFT with the LDA. It is found that all the SiC nanotubes are semiconductors, except the ultrasmall (3,0) and (4,0) zigzag tubes which are metallic. Furthermore, the band gap of the zigzag SiC-NTs which is direct, may be reduced from that of the SiC sheet to zero by reducing the diameter ($D$), though the band gap for all the SiC nanotubes with a diameter larger than ~20 \AA$$ is almost independent of diameter. For the electric field parallel to the tube axis ($E\parallel \hat{z}$), the $\epsilon''$ for all the SiC-NTs with a moderate diameter (say, $D$ $>$ 8 \AA$$) in the low-energy region (0~6 eV) consists of a single distinct peak at ~3 eV. However, for the small diameter SiC nanotubes such as the (4,2),(4,4) SiC-NTs, the $\epsilon''$ spectrum does deviate markedly from this general behavior. In the high-energy region (from 6 eV upwards), the $\epsilon''$ for all the SiC-NTs exhibit a broad peak centered at ~7 eV. For the electric field perpendicular to the tube axis ($E\perp \hat{z}$), the $\epsilon''$ spectrum of all the SiC-NTs except the (4,4), (3,0) and (4,0) nanotubes, in the low energy region also consists of a pronounced peak at around 3 eV whilst in the high-energy region is roughly made up of a broad hump starting from 6 eV. The magnitude of the peaks is in general about half of the magnitude of the corresponding ones for $E\parallel \hat{z}$

Successive interference cancellation schemes for time-reversal space-time block codes

In this paper, we propose two simple signal detectors that are based on successive interference cancellation (SIC) for time-reversal space-time block codes to combat intersymbol interference in frequency-selective fading environments. The main idea is to treat undetected symbols and noise together as Gaussian noise with matching mean and variance and use the already-detected symbols to help current signal recovery. The first scheme is a simple SIC signal detector whose ordering is based on the channel powers. The second proposed SIC scheme, which is denoted parallel arbitrated SIC (PA-SIC), is a structure that concatenates in parallel a certain number of SIC detectors with different ordering sequences and then combines the soft output of each individual SIC to achieve performance gains. For the proposed PA-SIC, we describe the optimal ordering algorithm as a combinatorial problem and present a low-complexity ordering technique for signal decoding. Simulations show that the new schemes can provide a performance that is very close to maximum-likelihood sequence estimation (MLSE) decoding under time-invariant conditions. Results for frequency-selective and doubly selective fading channels show that the proposed schemes significantly outperform the conventional minimum mean square error-(MMSE) like receiver and that the new PA-SIC performs much better than the proposed conventional SIC and is not far in performance from the MLSE. The computational complexity of the SIC algorithms is only linear with the number of transmit antennas and transmission rates, which is very close to the MMSE and much lower than the MLSE. The PA-SIC also has a complexity that is linear with the number of SIC components that are in parallel, and the optimum tradeoff between performance and complexity can be easily determined according to the number of SIC detectors