Impact of internal heating on the thermal evolution of neutron stars

The impact of various competing heating processes on the thermal evolution of neutron stars is investigated. We show that internal heating leads to significantly enhanced surface temperatures for pulsars of middle and old age. The heating due to thermal creep of pinned vortices and due to outward motion of proton vortices in the interior of the star leads to a better agreement with the observed data in the case of enhanced cooling. The strong pinning models are ruled out by a comparison with the cooling data on the old pulsars. For millisecond pulsars, the heating due to thermal creep of pinned vortices and chemical heating of the core have the largest impact on the surface temperatures. The angular dependence of the heating rates require two dimensional cooling simulations in general. Such a simulation is performed for a selected case in order to check the applicability of one-dimensional codes used in the past.Comment: 18 pages, to be published in A & A. Postscript and additional tables at http://www.physik.uni-muenchen.de/sektion/suessmann/astro/cool/schaab.109

Livoniae et Curlandiae Tabula

ttp://tartu.ester.ee/record=b1815990~S1*es

A study of imprint and etching behavior on fused silica of a new tailored resist mr-NIL213FC for soft UV-NIL

A new type of a specifically tailored resist for Soft Nanoimprint Lithography (Soft UV-NIL) namely mr-NIL213FC has been developed. It aims for a significant improvement of its etch-resistance with regard to underlying oxide substrates such as glass. This work demonstrates the first study of its imprint performance and etching behavior against fused silica wafers. First of all, the resist shows full compatibility with automated Soft UV-NIL using PDMS-based soft stamps and at ambient (oxygen containing) conditions for both step-and-repeat and full-wafer approaches. Moreover, the selectivity of the resist to the underlying fused silica substrate, in a high power and high etch rate condition, has reached to over 0.6, which is a significant step-up among most products in this context. The improved resistance of the resist facilitates direct etching processes for high resolution and high structure fidelity

A robust screen for novel antibiotics: specific knockout of the initiator of bacterial DNA replication

n/

Highly anisotropic fluorine-based plasma etching of ultralow expansion glass

Deep etching of glass and glass ceramics is far more challenging than silicon etching. For thermally insensitive microelectromechanical and microoptical systems, zero-expansion materials such as Zerodur or ultralow expansion (ULE) glass are intriguing. In contrast to Zerodur that exhibits a complex glass network composition, ULE glass consists of only two components, namely, TiO2 and SiO2. This fact is highly beneficial for plasma etching. Herein, a deep fluorine-based etching process for ULE 7972 glass is shown for the first time that yields an etch rate of up to 425 nm min^-1 while still achieving vertical sidewall angles of 87°. The process offers a selectivity of almost 20 with respect to a nickel hard mask and is overall comparable with fused silica. The chemical surface composition is additionally investigated to elucidate the etching process and the impact of the tool configuration in comparison with previously published etching results achieved in Zerodur. Therefore, deep and narrow trenches can be etched in ULE glass with high anisotropy, which supports a prospective implementation of ULE glass microstructures, for instance, in metrology and miniaturized precision applications