32,056 research outputs found
Temperature enhanced effects of ozone on cardiovascular mortality in 95 large US communities, 1987-2000 - assessment using the NMMAPS data
A few studies examined interactive effects between air pollution and temperature on health outcomes. This study is to examine if temperature modified effects of ozone and cardiovascular mortality in 95 large US cities. A nonparametric and a parametric regression models were separately used to explore interactive effects of temperature and ozone on cardiovascular mortality during May and October, 1987-2000. A Bayesian meta-analysis was used to pool estimates. Both models illustrate that temperature enhanced the ozone effects on mortality in the northern region, but obviously in the southern region. A 10-ppb increment in ozone was associated with 0.41 % (95% posterior interval (PI): -0.19 %, 0.93 %), 0.27 % (95% PI: -0.44 %, 0.87 %) and 1.68 % (95% PI: 0.07 %, 3.26 %) increases in daily cardiovascular mortality corresponding to low, moderate and high levels of temperature, respectively. We concluded that temperature modified effects of ozone, particularly in the northern region
Exploring the Way to Approach the Efficiency Limit of Perovskite Solar Cells by Drift-Diffusion Model
Drift-diffusion model is an indispensable modeling tool to understand the
carrier dynamics (transport, recombination, and collection) and simulate
practical-efficiency of solar cells (SCs) through taking into account various
carrier recombination losses existing in multilayered device structures.
Exploring the way to predict and approach the SC efficiency limit by using the
drift-diffusion model will enable us to gain more physical insights and design
guidelines for emerging photovoltaics, particularly perovskite solar cells. Our
work finds out that two procedures are the prerequisites for predicting and
approaching the SC efficiency limit. Firstly, the intrinsic radiative
recombination needs to be corrected after adopting optical designs which will
significantly affect the open-circuit voltage at its Shockley-Queisser limit.
Through considering a detailed balance between emission and absorption of
semiconductor materials at the thermal equilibrium, and the Boltzmann
statistics at the non-equilibrium, we offer a different approach to derive the
accurate expression of intrinsic radiative recombination with the optical
corrections for semiconductor materials. The new expression captures light
trapping of the absorbed photons and angular restriction of the emitted photons
simultaneously, which are ignored in the traditional Roosbroeck-Shockley
expression. Secondly, the contact characteristics of the electrodes need to be
carefully engineered to eliminate the charge accumulation and surface
recombination at the electrodes. The selective contact or blocking layer
incorporated nonselective contact that inhibits the surface recombination at
the electrode is another important prerequisite. With the two procedures, the
accurate prediction of efficiency limit and precise evaluation of efficiency
degradation for perovskite solar cells are attainable by the drift-diffusion
model.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figure
Collective Almost Synchronization in Complex Networks
This work introduces the phenomenon of Collective Almost Synchronization
(CAS), which describes a universal way of how patterns can appear in complex
networks even for small coupling strengths. The CAS phenomenon appears due to
the existence of an approximately constant local mean field and is
characterized by having nodes with trajectories evolving around periodic stable
orbits. Common notion based on statistical knowledge would lead one to
interpret the appearance of a local constant mean field as a consequence of the
fact that the behavior of each node is not correlated to the behaviors of the
others. Contrary to this common notion, we show that various well known weaker
forms of synchronization (almost, time-lag, phase synchronization, and
generalized synchronization) appear as a result of the onset of an almost
constant local mean field. If the memory is formed in a brain by minimising the
coupling strength among neurons and maximising the number of possible patterns,
then the CAS phenomenon is a plausible explanation for it.Comment: 3 figure
Conductance spectra of metallic nanotube bundles
We report a first principles analysis of electronic transport characteristics
for (n,n) carbon nanotube bundles. When n is not a multiple of 3, inter-tube
coupling causes universal conductance suppression near Fermi level regardless
of the rotational arrangement of individual tubes. However, when n is a
multiple of 3, the bundles exhibit a diversified conductance dependence on the
orientation details of the constituent tubes. The total energy of the bundle is
also sensitive to the orientation arrangement only when n is a multiple of 3.
All the transport properties and band structures can be well understood from
the symmetry consideration of whether the rotational symmetry of the individual
tubes is commensurate with that of the bundle
High-Efficient Parallel CAVLC Encoders on Heterogeneous Multicore Architectures
This article presents two high-efficient parallel realizations of the context-based adaptive variable length coding (CAVLC) based on heterogeneous multicore processors. By optimizing the architecture of the CAVLC encoder, three kinds of dependences are eliminated or weaken, including the context-based data dependence, the memory accessing dependence and the control dependence. The CAVLC pipeline is divided into three stages: two scans, coding, and lag packing, and be implemented on two typical heterogeneous multicore architectures. One is a block-based SIMD parallel CAVLC encoder on multicore stream processor STORM. The other is a component-oriented SIMT parallel encoder on massively parallel architecture GPU. Both of them exploited rich data-level parallelism. Experiments results show that compared with the CPU version, more than 70 times of speedup can be obtained for STORM and over 50 times for GPU. The implementation of encoder on STORM can make a real-time processing for 1080p @30fps and GPU-based version can satisfy the requirements for 720p real-time encoding. The throughput of the presented CAVLC encoders is more than 10 times higher than that of published software encoders on DSP and multicore platforms
Integer quantum Hall effect and topological phase transitions in silicene
We numerically investigate the effects of disorder on the quantum Hall effect
(QHE) and the quantum phase transitions in silicene based on a lattice model.
It is shown that for a clean sample, silicene exhibits an unconventional QHE
near the band center, with plateaus developing at and
a conventional QHE near the band edges. In the presence of disorder, the Hall
plateaus can be destroyed through the float-up of extended levels toward the
band center, in which higher plateaus disappear first. However, the center
Hall plateau is more sensitive to disorder and disappears at a
relatively weak disorder strength. Moreover, the combination of an electric
field and the intrinsic spin-orbit interaction (SOI) can lead to quantum phase
transitions from a topological insulator to a band insulator at the charge
neutrality point (CNP), accompanied by additional quantum Hall conductivity
plateaus.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figure
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