A Facile Strategy for In Situ Core-Template-Functionalizing Siliceous Hollow Nanospheres for Guest Species Entrapment

The shell wall-functionalized siliceous hollow nanospheres (SHNs) with functional molecules represent an important class of nanocarriers for a rich range of potential applications. Herein, a self-templated approach has been developed for the synthesis of in situ functionalized SHNs, in which the biocompatible long-chain polycarboxylates (i.e., polyacrylate, polyaspartate, gelatin) provide the framework for silica precursor deposition by simply controlling chain conformation with divalent metal ions (i.e., Ca2+, Sr2+), without the intervention of any external templates. Metal ions play crucial roles in the formation of organic vesicle templates by modulating the long chains of polymers and preventing them from separation by washing process. We also show that, by in situ functionalizing the shell wall of SHNs, it is capable of entrapping nearly an eightfold quantity of vitamin Bc in comparison to the bare bulk silica nanospheres. These results confirm the feasibility of guest species entrapment in the functionalized shell wall, and SHNs are effective carriers of guest (bio-)molecules potentially for a variety of biomedical applications. By rationally choosing the functional (self-templating) molecules, this concept may represent a general strategy for the production of functionalized silica hollow structures

Irradiation aging of the CMS Drift Tube muon detector

During the High Luminosity LHC, the Drift Tube chambers installed in the CMS detector need to operate with an integrated dose ten times higher than expected at the LHC due to the increase in integrated luminosity from 300 fb(-1) to 3000 fb(-1). Irradiations have been performed to assess the performance of the detector under such conditions and to characterize the radiation aging of the detector. The presented analysis focuses on the behaviour of the high voltage currents and the dose measurements needed to extrapolate the results to High Luminosity conditions, using data from the photon irradiation campaign at GIF ++ in 2016 as well as the efficiency analysis from the irradiation campaign started in 2017. Although the single-wire loss of high voltage gain observed of 70% is very high, the muon reconstruction efficiency is expected to decrease less than 20% during the full duration of High Luminosity LHC in the areas under highest irradiation