Hot Filament Chemical Vapor Deposition: Enabling the Scalable Synthesis of Bilayer Graphene and Other Carbon Materials

The hot filament chemical vapor deposition (HFCVD) technique is limited only by the size of the reactor and lends itself to be incorporated into continuous roll-to-roll industrial fabrication processes. We discuss the HFCVD reactor design and the interplay between the reactor parameters, such as filament and substrate temperatures, filament-to-substrate distance, and total pressure. Special attention is given to the large-area synthesis of bilayer graphene on copper, which is successfully grown by HFCVD with transmittance greater than 90% in the visible region and no gaps. We also discuss the HFCVD synthesis of carbon nanotubes, microcrystalline diamond, and nanocrystalline diamond

Disease Knowledge Transfer across Neurodegenerative Diseases

We introduce Disease Knowledge Transfer (DKT), a novel technique for transferring biomarker information between related neurodegenerative diseases. DKT infers robust multimodal biomarker trajectories in rare neurodegenerative diseases even when only limited, unimodal data is available, by transferring information from larger multimodal datasets from common neurodegenerative diseases. DKT is a joint-disease generative model of biomarker progressions, which exploits biomarker relationships that are shared across diseases. Our proposed method allows, for the first time, the estimation of plausible, multimodal biomarker trajectories in Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA), a rare neurodegenerative disease where only unimodal MRI data is available. For this we train DKT on a combined dataset containing subjects with two distinct diseases and sizes of data available: 1) a larger, multimodal typical AD (tAD) dataset from the TADPOLE Challenge, and 2) a smaller unimodal Posterior Cortical Atrophy (PCA) dataset from the Dementia Research Centre (DRC), for which only a limited number of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans are available. Although validation is challenging due to lack of data in PCA, we validate DKT on synthetic data and two patient datasets (TADPOLE and PCA cohorts), showing it can estimate the ground truth parameters in the simulation and predict unseen biomarkers on the two patient datasets. While we demonstrated DKT on Alzheimer's variants, we note DKT is generalisable to other forms of related neurodegenerative diseases. Source code for DKT is available online: https://github.com/mrazvan22/dkt.Comment: accepted at MICCAI 2019, 13 pages, 5 figures, 2 table

Study on the optical and electrical properties of tetracyanoethylene doped bilayer graphene stack for transparent conducting electrodes

We report the optical and electrical properties of chemically-doped bilayer graphene stack by tetracyanoethylene, a strong electron acceptor. The Tetracyanoethylene doping on the bilayer graphene via charge transfer was confirmed by Raman spectroscopy and Infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy. Doped graphene shows a significant increase in the sheet carrier concentration of up to 1.520 × 1013 cm−2 with a concomitant reduction of the sheet resistance down to 414.1 Ω/sq. The high optical transmittance (ca. 84%) in the visible region in combination with the low sheet resistance of the Tetracyanoethylene-doped bilayer graphene stack opens up the possibility of making transparent conducting electrodes for practical applications

Grain size-dependent thermal conductivity of polycrystalline twisted bilayer graphene

We report the room temperature thermal conductivity of polycrystalline twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) as a function of grain size measured by employing a noncontact optical technique based on micro-Raman spectroscopy. Polycrystalline tBLG sheets of different grain sizes were synthesized on copper by hot filament chemical vapor deposition. The thermal conductivity values are 1305±122, 971±73, and 657±42 Wm−1K−1 for polycrystalline tBLG with average grain sizes of 54, 21, and 8 nm, respectively. Based on these thermal conductivity values, we also estimated the grain boundary conductance, 14.43±1.21×1010Wm−2K−1, and the thermal conductivity for single crystal tBLG, 1510±103Wm−1K−1. Our results show that the relative degradation of thermal conductivity due to grain boundaries is smaller in bilayer than in monolayer graphene. Molecular dynamics simulations indicate that interlayer interactions play an important role in the heat conductivity of polycrystalline bilayer graphene. The quantitative study of the grain size dependent thermal conductivity of polycrystalline bilayer graphene is valuable in technological applications as well as for fundamental scientific understanding

English as the medium of instruction: a response to internationalization

The status of English as a lingua franca has led European universities to implement the use of this language as a medium of instruction (EMI). This study presents an analysis of the status quo of EMI at the University of Alicante. It takes into account the institution`s language policy and the programs which offer subjects in English, as well as the challenges, needs and benefits of the professors and students. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected by means of questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. The findings of this needs analysis will help us to create an action plan that will include teacher and student training schemes to foster internationalization

Overall evaluation of Skylab imagery for mapping of Latin America

The author has identified the following significant results. Skylab imagery is both desired and needed by the Latin American catographic agencies. The imagery is cost beneficial for the production of new mapping and maintenance of existing maps at national topographic series scales. If this information was available on a near time routine coverage basis, it would provide an excellent additional data base to the Latin American cartographic community, specifically Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Paraguay, and Venezuela