The "Po-ethical Turn" in Post-War Austrian Literature Through Ilse Aichinger's Texts

The publications of the short story “Das vierte Tor” (“The Fourth Gate”, 1945) and the novel Die größere Hoffnung (The Greater Hope, 1948) by Ilse Aichinger mark the beginning of post-war Austrian literature. Like several of her contemporaries, including Paul Celan, Ingeborg Bachmann and Milo Dor, Aichinger was part of a generation of survivors of the atrocities of war and National Socialism. After 1945, the “old guard” of poets incited the young generation to find a new voice within post-war German-speaking literature and set new standards in the literary field. The reading of Ilse Aichinger’s texts, which were first published in the immediate post-war period, is thus not merely a literary matter. Rather, it is a way to reach the core of post-war culture within the German-speaking world, especially in the Austrian context, where the tradition of language skepticism and Sprachkritik has always been linked to political and ethical issues. To reflect upon literature and cultural production in the context of Austria’s problematic denazification means to focus not on a “message,” but instead on a “poethics” as a new form of commitment. This was not only an individual effort by authors, but the expression of a collective act of will in which individual instances and political strategies (not all controlled by the authors themselves) played a role in the cultural field(s) during Cold War years. The paper also discusses the fundamental role played by literary magazines as an important instrument of cultural renewal, as well as by their actors, gate-keepers, and financial and political influencers in the post-war context

Self Assembly of Soft Matter Quasicrystals and Their Approximants

The surprising recent discoveries of quasicrystals and their approximants in soft matter systems poses the intriguing possibility that these structures can be realized in a broad range of nano- and micro-scale assemblies. It has been theorized that soft matter quasicrystals and approximants are largely entropically stabilized, but the thermodynamic mechanism underlying their formation remains elusive. Here, we use computer simulation and free energy calculations to demonstrate a simple design heuristic for assembling quasicrystals and approximants in soft matter systems. Our study builds on previous simulation studies of the self-assembly of dodecagonal quasicrystals and approximants in minimal systems of spherical particles with complex, highly-specific interaction potentials. We demonstrate an alternative entropy-based approach for assembling dodecagonal quasicrystals and approximants based solely on particle functionalization and shape, thereby recasting the interaction-potential-based assembly strategy in terms of simpler-to-achieve bonded and excluded-volume interactions. Here, spherical building blocks are functionalized with mobile surface entities to encourage the formation of structures with low surface contact area, including non-close-packed and polytetrahedral structures. The building blocks also possess shape polydispersity, where a subset of the building blocks deviate from the ideal spherical shape, discouraging the formation of close-packed crystals. We show that three different model systems with both of these features -- mobile surface entities and shape polydispersity -- consistently assemble quasicrystals and/or approximants. We argue that this design strategy can be widely exploited to assemble quasicrystals and approximants on the nano- and micro- scales. In addition, our results further elucidate the formation of soft matter quasicrystals in experiment.Comment: 12 pages 6 figure

Learning Agent for a Heat-Pump Thermostat With a Set-Back Strategy Using Model-Free Reinforcement Learning

The conventional control paradigm for a heat pump with a less efficient auxiliary heating element is to keep its temperature set point constant during the day. This constant temperature set point ensures that the heat pump operates in its more efficient heat-pump mode and minimizes the risk of activating the less efficient auxiliary heating element. As an alternative to a constant set-point strategy, this paper proposes a learning agent for a thermostat with a set-back strategy. This set-back strategy relaxes the set-point temperature during convenient moments, e.g. when the occupants are not at home. Finding an optimal set-back strategy requires solving a sequential decision-making process under uncertainty, which presents two challenges. A first challenge is that for most residential buildings a description of the thermal characteristics of the building is unavailable and challenging to obtain. A second challenge is that the relevant information on the state, i.e. the building envelope, cannot be measured by the learning agent. In order to overcome these two challenges, our paper proposes an auto-encoder coupled with a batch reinforcement learning technique. The proposed approach is validated for two building types with different thermal characteristics for heating in the winter and cooling in the summer. The simulation results indicate that the proposed learning agent can reduce the energy consumption by 4-9% during 100 winter days and by 9-11% during 80 summer days compared to the conventional constant set-point strategyComment: Submitted to Energies - MDPI.co

Evidence of magnetic field quenching of phosphorous-doped silicon quantum dots

We present data on the electrical transport properties of highly-doped silicon-on-insulator quantum dots under the effect of pulsed magnetic fields up to 48 T. At low field intensities, B<7 T, we observe a strong modification of the conductance due to the destruction of weak localization whereas at higher fields, where the magnetic field length becomes comparable to the effective Bohr radius of phosphorous in silicon, a strong decrease in conductance is demonstrated. Data in the high and low electric field bias regimes are then compared to show that close to the Coulomb blockade edge magnetically-induced quenching to single donors in the quantum dot is achieved at about 40 T.Comment: accepted for publication at Current Applied Physic

On the electrical conductivity of alginate hydrogels

Hydrogels have been extensively used in the field of biomedical applications, offering customisable natural, synthetic or hybrid materials, particularly relevant in the field of tissue engineering. In the bioelectronics discipline hydrogels are promising mainly as sensing platforms with or without encapsulated cells, showing great potential in healthcare and medicine. However, to date there is little data in the literature which characterises the electrical properties of tissue engineering materials which are relevant to bioelectronics. In this work we present electrical characterization of alginate hydrogels, a natural polysaccharide, using a four-probe method similar to electrical impedance spectroscopy. The acquired conductance data show distinct frequency dependent features that change as a function of alginate and crosslinker concentration reflecting ion kinetics inside the measured sample. Furthermore, the presence of NIH 3T3 fibroblasts encapsulated in the hydrogels matrix was found to alter the artificial tissue’s electrical properties. The method used provides valuable insight to the frequency dependent electrical response of the resulting systems. It is hoped that the outcomes of this research will be of use in the development of cell/electronic interfaces, possibly towards diagnostic biosensors and therapeutic bioelectronics