TOTAL IONIZING DOSE EFFECTS AND RADIATION TESTING

Total ionizing dose (TID) effects and radiation tests of complex multifunctional Very-large-scale integration (VLSI) integrated circuits (ICs) rise up some particularities as compared to conventional "simple" ICs. The main difficulty is to organize informative and quick functional test dirctly under irradiation. Functional tests approach specified for complex multifunctional VLSI devices is presented and the basic radiation test procedure is discussed in application to some typical examples. 

Dynamic Diffractive Patterns in Helix-Inverting Cholesteric Liquid Crystals

The future of adaptive materials will rely on transduction of molecular motion across increasing length scales, up to the macroscopic and functional level. In this context, liquid crystals have emerged as a promising amplification medium, in view of their long-range order and high sensitivity to external stimuli, and in particular, chiral liquid crystals have demonstrated widely tunable optical properties and invertible handedness. Here, we demonstrate that by applying weak electric fields, regular, periodic and light-tunable patterns can be formed spontaneously in cholesteric liquid crystals. These patterns can be used as light-tunable diffraction gratings for which the period, the diffraction efficiency, and the in-plane orientation of grating vector can be controlled precisely, reversibly, and independently. Such a photoregulation allows generating a variety of one- and two-dimensional complex diffractive patterns in a single material. Our data are also supported by modeling and theoretical calculations. Overall, the fine tunability of cholesteric materials doped with artificial molecular switches makes them attractive for optics and photonics

Peatland Development, Vegetation History, Climate Change and Human Activity in the Valdai Uplands (Central European Russia) during the Holocene: A Multi-Proxy Palaeoecological Study

Peatlands are remarkable for their specific biodiversity, crucial role in carbon cycling and climate change. Their deposits preserve organism remains that can be used to reconstruct long-term ecosystem and environmental changes as well as human impact in the prehistorical and historical past. This study presents a new multi-proxy reconstruction of the peatland and vegetation development investigating climate dynamics and human impact at the border between mixed and boreal forests in the Valdai Uplands (the East European Plain, Russia) during most of the Holocene. We performed plant macrofossil, pollen, testate amoeba, Cladocera, diatom, peat humification, loss on ignition, carbon and nitrogen content, δ13C and δ15N analyses supported by radiocarbon dating of the peat deposits from the Krivetskiy Mokh mire. The results of the study indicate that the wetland ecosystem underwent a classic hydroserial succession from a lake (8300 BC–900 BC) terrestrialized through a fen (900 BC–630 AD) to an ombrotrophic bog (630 AD–until present) and responded to climate changes documented over the Holocene. Each stage was associated with clear changes in local diversity of organisms responding mostly to autogenic successional changes during the lake stage and to allogenic factors at the fen-bog stage. The latter can be related to increased human impact and greater sensitivity of peatland ecosystems to external, especially climatic, drivers as compared to lakes