Office buildings towards the concept of corporate image. Gualino Palace: a disappeared case of corporate modernism

The article focuses on the concept of Gesamtkunstwerk in office buildings. Since the Twenties architects have begun to consider furniture and furnishing in modern office as an opportunity to combine their functional needs according to the image of a modern company. Giuseppe Pagano and Gino Levi Montalcini, two Italian architects involved in office modern design, built and furnished Palazzo Gualino (Turin, 1928-1930) considered as a prime example of the new rationalist architecture in Italy. Every single detail was carefully studied following the concept of company identity. Over the years Palazzo Gualino was sold to different companies and a lot of its furniture disappeared. As a consequence, due to the change of its function, a restoration was carried out without considering the preservation of its interior design. Thus, a question arises: is it possible to preserve the historical value of a unique office building when a change of its function occurs

Exceptionally large room-temperature ferroelectric polarization in the novel PbNiO3 multiferroic oxide

We present a study based on several advanced First-Principles methods, of the recently synthesized PbNiO3 [J. Am. Chem. Soc 133, 16920 (2011)], a rhombohedral antiferromagnetic insulator which crystallizes in the highly distorted R3c crystal structure. We find this compound electrically polarized, with a very large electric polarization of about 100 (\muC/cm)^2, thus even exceeding the polarization of well-known BiFeO3. PbNiO3 is a proper ferroelectric, with polarization driven by large Pb-O polar displacements along the [111] direction. Contrarily to naive expectations, a definite ionic charge of 4+ for Pb ion can not be assigned, and in fact the large Pb 6s-O 2p hybridization drives the ferroelectric distortion through a lone-pair mechanism similar to that of other Pb- and Bi-based multiferroic

Diagrammatic Monte Carlo study of the Fr\"ohlich polaron dispersion in 2D and 3D

We present results for the solution of the large polaron Fr\"ohlich Hamiltonian in 3-dimensions (3D) and 2-dimensions (2D) obtained via the Diagrammatic Monte Carlo (DMC) method. Our implementation is based on the approach by Mishchenko [A.S. Mishchenko et al., Phys. Rev. B 62, 6317 (2000)]. Polaron ground state energies and effective polaron masses are successfully benchmarked with data obtained using Feynman's path integral formalism. By comparing 3D and 2D data, we verify the analytically exact scaling relations for energies and effective masses from 3D$\to$2D, which provides a stringent test for the quality of DMC predictions. The accuracy of our results is further proven by providing values for the exactly known coefficients in weak- and strong coupling expansions. Moreover, we compute polaron dispersion curves which are validated with analytically known lower and upper limits in the small coupling regime and verify the first order expansion results for larger couplings, thus disproving previous critiques on the apparent incompatibility of DMC with analytical results and furnishing useful reference for a wide range of coupling strengths