Creep fatigue of low-cobalt superalloys: Waspalloy, PM U 700 and wrought U 700

The influence of cobalt content on the high temperature creep fatigue crack initiation resistance of three primary alloys was evaluated. These were Waspalloy, Powder U 700, and Cast U 700, with cobalt contents ranging from 0 up to 17 percent. Waspalloy was studied at 538 C whereas the U 700 was studied at 760 C. Constraints of the program required investigation at a single strain range using diametral strain control. The approach was phenomenological, using standard low cycle fatigue tests involving continuous cycling tension hold cycling, compression hold cycling, and symmetric hold cycling. Cycling in the absence of or between holds was done at 0.5 Hz, whereas holds when introduced lasted 1 minute. The plan was to allocate two specimens to the continuous cycling, and one specimen to each of the hold time conditions. Data was taken to document the nature of the cracking process, the deformation response, and the resistance to cyclic loading to the formation of small cracks and to specimen separation. The influence of cobalt content on creep fatigue resistance was not judged to be very significant based on the results generated. Specific conclusions were that the hold time history dependence of the resistance is as significant as the influence of cobalt content and increased cobalt content does not produce increased creep fatigue resistance on a one to one basis

Expansion theorems for solutions of two generalizations of the heat equation report no. 209

Expansion theorems for solution of heat equation by two generalizations - set theor

Extremely asymmetrical scattering in gratings with varying mean structural parameters

Extremely asymmetrical scattering (EAS) is an unusual type of Bragg scattering in slanted periodic gratings with the scattered wave (the +1 diffracted order) propagating parallel to the grating boundaries. Here, a unique and strong sensitivity of EAS to small stepwise variations of mean structural parameters at the grating boundaries is predicted theoretically (by means of approximate and rigorous analyses) for bulk TE electromagnetic waves and slab optical modes of arbitrary polarization in holographic (for bulk waves) and corrugation (for slab modes) gratings. The predicted effects are explained using one of the main physical reasons for EAS--the diffractional divergence of the scattered wave (similar to divergence of a laser beam). The approximate method of analysis is based on this understanding of the role of the divergence of the scattered wave, while the rigorous analysis uses the enhanced T-matrix algorithm. The effect of small and large stepwise variations of the mean permittivity at the grating boundaries is analysed. Two distinctly different and unusual patterns of EAS are predicted in the cases of wide and narrow (compared to a critical width) gratings. Comparison between the approximate and rigorous theories is carried out.Comment: 16 pages, 5 figure

To Tune or Not to Tune?: In Search of Optimal Configurations for Data Analytics

This experimental study presents several overlooked issues that pose a challenge for data analytics configuration tuning and deployment. These issues include: 1) the assumption of static workload/environment ignoring the dynamic characteristics of the analytics environment (e.g. the frequent need for workload retuning). 2) the speed of tuning cost amortization and how this influences the tuning decision. 3) the need for a comprehensive incremental tuning for a diverse set of workloads. To prove our point, we present Tuneful, an efficient configuration tuning framework for data analytics. We show how it is designed to overcome the above issues and illustrate its applicability by experimenting with it on two cloud service providers

Materials, photophysics and device engineering of perovskite light-emitting diodes

Here we provide a comprehensive review of a newly developed lighting technology based on metal halide perovskites (i.e. perovskite light-emitting diodes) encompassing the research endeavours into materials, photophysics and device engineering. At the outset we survey the basic perovskite structures and their various dimensions (namely three-, two- and zero-dimensional perovskites), and demonstrate how the compositional engineering of these structures affects the perovskite light-emitting properties. Next, we turn to the physics underpinning photo- and electroluminescence in these materials through their connection to the fundamental excited states, energy/charge transport processes and radiative and non-radiative decay mechanisms. In the remainder of the review, we focus on the engineering of perovskite light-emitting diodes, including the history of their development as well as an extensive analysis of contemporary strategies for boosting device performance. Key concepts include balancing the electron/hole injection, suppression of parasitic carrier losses, improvement of the photoluminescence quantum yield and enhancement of the light extraction. Overall, this review reflects the current paradigm for perovskite lighting, and is intended to serve as a foundation to materials and device scientists newly working in this field

"Pre-semantic" cognition revisited: Critical differences between semantic aphasia and semantic dementia

Patients with semantic dementia show a specific pattern of impairment on both verbal and non-verbal “pre-semantic” tasks: e.g., reading aloud, past tense generation, spelling to dictation, lexical decision, object decision, colour decision and delayed picture copying. All seven tasks are characterised by poorer performance for items that are atypical of the domain and “regularisation errors” (irregular/atypical items are produced as if they were domain-typical). The emergence of this pattern across diverse tasks in the same patients indicates that semantic memory plays a key role in all of these types of “pre-semantic” processing. However, this claim remains controversial because semantically-impaired patients sometimes fail to show an influence of regularity. This study demonstrates that (a) the location of brain damage and (b) the underlying nature of the semantic deficit affect the likelihood of observing the expected relationship between poor comprehension and regularity effects. We compared the effect of multimodal semantic impairment in the context of semantic dementia and stroke aphasia on the seven “pre-semantic” tasks listed above. In all of these tasks, the semantic aphasia patients were less sensitive to typicality than the semantic dementia patients, even though the two groups obtained comparable scores on semantic tests. The semantic aphasia group also made fewer regularisation errors and many more unrelated and perseverative responses. We propose that these group differences reflect the different locus for the semantic impairment in the two conditions: patients with semantic dementia have degraded semantic representations, whereas semantic aphasia patients show deregulated semantic cognition with concomitant executive deficits. These findings suggest a reinterpretation of single case studies of comprehension-impaired aphasic patients who fail to show the expected effect of regularity on “pre-semantic” tasks. Consequently, such cases do not demonstrate the independence of these tasks from semantic memory

On the Gold Standard for Security of Universal Steganography

While symmetric-key steganography is quite well understood both in the information-theoretic and in the computational setting, many fundamental questions about its public-key counterpart resist persistent attempts to solve them. The computational model for public-key steganography was proposed by von Ahn and Hopper in EUROCRYPT 2004. At TCC 2005, Backes and Cachin gave the first universal public-key stegosystem - i.e. one that works on all channels - achieving security against replayable chosen-covertext attacks (SS-RCCA) and asked whether security against non-replayable chosen-covertext attacks (SS-CCA) is achievable. Later, Hopper (ICALP 2005) provided such a stegosystem for every efficiently sampleable channel, but did not achieve universality. He posed the question whether universality and SS-CCA-security can be achieved simultaneously. No progress on this question has been achieved since more than a decade. In our work we solve Hopper's problem in a somehow complete manner: As our main positive result we design an SS-CCA-secure stegosystem that works for every memoryless channel. On the other hand, we prove that this result is the best possible in the context of universal steganography. We provide a family of 0-memoryless channels - where the already sent documents have only marginal influence on the current distribution - and prove that no SS-CCA-secure steganography for this family exists in the standard non-look-ahead model.Comment: EUROCRYPT 2018, llncs styl

Hot carrier cooling and trapping in atomically thin WS₂ probed by three-pulse femtosecond spectroscopy

Transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs) have shown outstanding semiconducting properties which make them promising materials for next-generation optoelectronic and electronic devices. These properties are imparted by fundamental carrier–carrier and carrier–phonon interactions that are foundational to hot carrier cooling. Recent transient absorption studies have reported ultrafast time scales for carrier cooling in TMDs that can be slowed at high excitation densities via a hot-phonon bottleneck (HPB) and discussed these findings in the light of optoelectronic applications. However, quantitative descriptions of the HPB in TMDs, including details of the electron–lattice coupling and how cooling is affected by the redistribution of energy between carriers, are still lacking. Here, we use femtosecond pump–push–probe spectroscopy as a single approach to systematically characterize the scattering of hot carriers with optical phonons, cold carriers, and defects in a benchmark TMD monolayer of polycrystalline WS2. By controlling the interband pump and intraband push excitations, we observe, in real-time (i) an extremely rapid “intrinsic” cooling rate of ∼18 ± 2.7 eV/ps, which can be slowed with increasing hot carrier density, (ii) the deprecation of this HPB at elevated cold carrier densities, exposing a previously undisclosed role of the carrier–carrier interactions in mediating cooling, and (iii) the interception of high energy hot carriers on the subpicosecond time scale by lattice defects, which may account for the lower photoluminescence yield of TMDs when excited above band gap

A primer on provenance

Better understanding data requires tracking its history and context.</jats:p