High-Q Gold and Silicon Nitride Bilayer Nanostrings

Low-mass, high-Q, silicon nitride nanostrings are at the cutting edge of nanomechanical devices for sensing applications. Here we show that the addition of a chemically functionalizable gold overlayer does not adversely affect the Q of the fundamental out-of-plane mode. Instead the device retains its mechanical responsiveness while gaining sensitivity to molecular bonding. Furthermore, differences in thermal expansion within the bilayer give rise to internal stresses that can be electrically controlled. In particular, an alternating current excites resonant motion of the nanostring. This AC thermoelastic actuation is simple, robust, and provides an integrated approach to sensor actuation.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures + supplementary materia

Removable hand hold

A hand hold utilizes joining mechanisms which comprises two different mounting brackets that are permanently fastened to a supporting structure. A slide plate is disposed at one end of the hand rail or hand hold which mates with one of the mounting brackets. A securing member is disposed at the opposite end of the hand rail/hand hold which connects with the other mounting bracket by means of a locking device. The slide plate has a central tapered tongue with two matching slots disposed on each side thereof

Particle number fluctuations in nuclear collisions within excluded volume hadron gas model

The multiplicity fluctuations are studied in the van der Waals excluded volume hadron-resonance gas model. The calculations are done in the grand canonical ensemble within the Boltzmann statistics approximation. The scaled variances for positive, negative and all charged hadrons are calculated along the chemical freeze-out line of nucleus-nucleus collisions at different collision energies. The multiplicity fluctuations are found to be suppressed in the van der Waals gas. The numerical calculations are presented for two values of hard-core hadron radius, $r=0.3$ fm and 0.5 fm, as well as for the upper limit of the excluded volume suppression effects.Comment: 19 pages, 4 figure

Grid Databases for Shared Image Analysis in the MammoGrid Project

The MammoGrid project aims to prove that Grid infrastructures can be used for collaborative clinical analysis of database-resident but geographically distributed medical images. This requires: a) the provision of a clinician-facing front-end workstation and b) the ability to service real-world clinician queries across a distributed and federated database. The MammoGrid project will prove the viability of the Grid by harnessing its power to enable radiologists from geographically dispersed hospitals to share standardized mammograms, to compare diagnoses (with and without computer aided detection of tumours) and to perform sophisticated epidemiological studies across national boundaries. This paper outlines the approach taken in MammoGrid to seamlessly connect radiologist workstations across a Grid using an "information infrastructure" and a DICOM-compliant object model residing in multiple distributed data stores in Italy and the UKComment: 10 pages, 5 figure