Review of the physical and mechanical properties and potential applications of the B2 compound NiAl: Unabridged version of a paper published in International materials review

Considerable work has been performed on NiAl over the last three decades, with an extremely rapid growth in research on this intermetallic occurring in the last few years due to recent interest in this material for electronic and high temperature structural applications. However, many physical properties and the controlling fracture and deformation mechanisms over certain temperature regimes are still in question. Part of this problem lies in the incomplete characterization of many of the alloys previously investigated. Fragmentary data on processing conditions, chemistry, microstructure and the apparent difficulty in accurately measuring composition has made direct comparison between individual studies sometimes tenuous. Therefore, the purpose of this review is to summarize all available mechanical and pertinent physical properties on NiAl, stressing the most recent investigations, in an attempt to understand the behavior of NiAl and its alloys over a broad temperature range

Electrochemical Evaluation of LaNi_(5–x)Ge_x Metal Hydride Alloys

We report a detailed evaluation of Ge-substituted LaNi_5 for electrochemical application as a negative electrode in alkaline rechargeable cells. Alloys with small substitutions of Ge for Ni show operating pressures, chargeability, cyclic lifetime, and kinetics for hydrogen absorption and desorption all superior to those found in many other substituted LaNi_5 alloys. These improved properties were achieved with a minimal reduction in hydrogen storage capacity

Electrochemical Studies on LaNi5–xSnx Metal Hydride Alloys

Electrochemical studies were performed on LaNi5–xSnx with 0 <= x <= 0.5. We measured the effect of the Sn substituent on the kinetics of charge-transfer and diffusion during hydrogen absorption and desorption, and the cyclic lifetimes of LaNi5–-xSnx electrodes in 250 mAh laboratory test cells. We report beneficial effects of making small substitutions of Sn for Ni in LaNi5 on the performance of the metal hydride alloy anode in terms of cyclic lifetime, capacity, and kinetics. The optimal concentration of Sn in LaNi5–xSnx alloys for negative electrodes in alkaline rechargeable secondary cells was found to lie in the range 0.25 <= x <= 0.3

Electrochemical Properties of LaNi5–xGex Alloys in Ni-MH Batteries

Electrochemical studies were performed on LaNi5–xGex metal hydride alloys with 0 <= x <= 0.5. We carried out single-electrode studies to understand the effects of the Ge substituent on the hydrogen absorption characteristics, the electrochemical capacity, and the electrochemical kinetics of hydrogen absorption and desorption. The electrochemical characteristics of the Ge-substituted alloys are compared to those of the Sn-substituted alloys reported earlier. LaNi5–xGex alloys show compositional trends similar to LaNi5–xSnx alloys, but unlike the Sn-substituted alloys, Ge-substituted alloys continue to exhibit facile kinetics for hydrogen absorption/desorption at high solute concentrations. Cycle lives of LaNi5–xGex electrodes were measured in 300 mAh laboratory test cells and were found to be superior to the Sn-substituted LaNi5 and comparable to a Mm(Ni,Co,Mn,Al)5 alloy. The optimum Ge content for LaNi5–xGex metal hydride alloys in alkaline rechargeable cells is in the range 0.4 <= x <= 0.5

Hydrogen desorption and adsorption measurements on graphite nanofibers

Graphite nanofibers were synthesized and their hydrogen desorption and adsorption properties are reported for 77 and 300 K. Catalysts were made by several different methods including chemical routes, mechanical alloying, and gas condensation. The nanofibers were grown by passing ethylene and H2 gases over the catalysts at 600 °C. Hydrogen desorption and adsorption were measured using a volumetric analysis Sieverts' apparatus, and the graphite nanofibers were characterized by transmission electron microscopy and Brunauer–Emmett–Teller surface area analysis. The absolute level of hydrogen desorption measured from these materials was typically less than the 0.01 H/C atom, comparable to other forms of carbon

KEYword based Sampling (KEYS) for Large Language Models

Question answering (Q/A) can be formulated as a generative task (Mitra, 2017) where the task is to generate an answer given the question and the passage (knowledge, if available). Recent advances in QA task is focused a lot on language model advancements and less on other areas such as sampling(Krishna et al., 2021), (Nakano et al., 2021). Keywords play very important role for humans in language generation. (Humans formulate keywords and use grammar to connect those keywords and work). In the research community, very little focus is on how humans generate answers to a question and how this behavior can be incorporated in a language model. In this paper, we want to explore these two areas combined, i.e., how sampling can be to used generate answers which are close to human-like behavior and factually correct. Hence, the type of decoding algorithm we think should be used for Q/A tasks should also depend on the keywords. These keywords can be obtained from the question, passage or internet results. We use knowledge distillation techniques to extract keywords and sample using these extracted keywords on top of vanilla decoding algorithms when formulating the answer to generate a human-like answer. In this paper, we show that our decoding method outperforms most commonly used decoding methods for Q/A tas

From Euclidean to Minkowski space with the Cauchy-Riemann equations

We present an elementary method to obtain Green's functions in non-perturbative quantum field theory in Minkowski space from calculated Green's functions in Euclidean space. Since in non-perturbative field theory the analytical structure of amplitudes is many times unknown, especially in the presence of confined fields, dispersive representations suffer from systematic uncertainties. Therefore we suggest to use the Cauchy-Riemann equations, that perform the analytical continuation without assuming global information on the function in the entire complex plane, only in the region through which the equations are solved. We use as example the quark propagator in Landau gauge Quantum Chromodynamics, that is known from lattice and Dyson-Schwinger studies in Euclidean space. The drawback of the method is the instability of the Cauchy-Riemann equations to high-frequency noise, that makes difficult to achieve good accuracy. We also point out a few curiosities related to the Wick rotation.Comment: 12 pages in EPJ double-column format, 16 figures. This version: added paragraph, two reference

Structural characterization of Si(m)Ge(n) strained layer superlattices

SimGen strained layer superlattice (SLS) structures were grown by molecular beam epitaxy on GexSi1-x buffer layers on Si substrates to determine the effects of buffer layer composition, SLS thickness ratio, and superlattice periodicity, on the overall quality of these structures. X-ray diffraction methods were used to determine how closely actual periodicities and compositions met targeted values, and to evaluate the quality of these samples. In most instances the as-grown structures matched the targeted values to within 10%, though in some instances deviations of 20-25% in either the period or composition were observed. The quality of the SLS structures was greatly dependent on the composition of the buffer layer on which it was grown. SimGen SLS structures grown on Si- and Ge-rich buffer layers were of much higher quality than SimGem SLSs grown on Ge0.50Si0.50 layers, but the x-ray rocking curves of the SimGen samples indicated that they were far from perfect and contained moderate levels of defects. These results were confirmed by cross sectional transmission electron microscopy, which showed that the SimGem structures contained significant numbers of dislocations and that the layers were nonuniform in thickness and wavy in appearance. SimGen structures, however, displayed fewer defects but some dislocations and nonparallelism of layers were still observed

The benefits of using a walking interface to navigate virtual environments

Navigation is the most common interactive task performed in three-dimensional virtual environments (VEs), but it is also a task that users often find difficult. We investigated how body-based information about the translational and rotational components of movement helped participants to perform a navigational search task (finding targets hidden inside boxes in a room-sized space). When participants physically walked around the VE while viewing it on a head-mounted display (HMD), they then performed 90&percnt; of trials perfectly, comparable to participants who had performed an equivalent task in the real world during a previous study. By contrast, participants performed less than 50&percnt; of trials perfectly if they used a tethered HMD (move by physically turning but pressing a button to translate) or a desktop display (no body-based information). This is the most complex navigational task in which a real-world level of performance has been achieved in a VE. Behavioral data indicates that both translational and rotational body-based information are required to accurately update one's position during navigation, and participants who walked tended to avoid obstacles, even though collision detection was not implemented and feedback not provided. A walking interface would bring immediate benefits to a number of VE applications