"Götterfunken aus dem Staub" : vom barocken Vanitas-Gedanken zur Idealisierung des Todes – Friedrich Schillers frühes Gedicht Melancholie / an Laura

Das Thema des Todes manifestiert sich im Werk Friedrich Schillers auf den ersten Blick vor allem in den Dramen [...] Doch das Drama ist nicht die einzige Gattung, innerhalb derer der Tod von Bedeutung ist. Seit jeher waren kleinere literarische Genres wie Elegie, Epicedium oder Epitaph diesem Thema gewidmet. Die Flut an elegischen und melancholischen Gedichten der Empfindsamkeit, etwa in der englischen "Graveyard"-Poesie oder in der Dichtung des "Göttinger Hain", belegt, daß gerade seit der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts die Lyrik in besonderer Weise als geeignet galt, Empfindungen wie Schmerz und Trauer zum Ausdruck zu bringen. Auch für die Werkgeschichte Friedrich Schillers ist es von nicht zu unterschätzender Bedeutung, daß in seiner frühen Lyrik, besonders in den Gedichten, die er in der von ihm selbst herausgegebenen Anthologie auf das Jahr 1782 veröffentlichte, die Todesthematik (in einer von der Empfindsamkeit deutlich abweichenden Weise) eine herausragende Stellung einnimmt – auch wenn Schiller diese Gedichte später als "die wilden Produkte eines jugendlichen Dilettantism" bezeichnete

Improved recursive Green's function formalism for quasi one-dimensional systems with realistic defects

We derive an improved version of the recursive Green's function formalism (RGF), which is a standard tool in the quantum transport theory. We consider the case of disordered quasi one-dimensional materials where the disorder is applied in form of randomly distributed realistic defects, leading to partly periodic Hamiltonian matrices. The algorithm accelerates the common RGF in the recursive decimation scheme, using the iteration steps of the renormalization decimation algorithm. This leads to a smaller effective system, which is treated using the common forward iteration scheme. The computational complexity scales linearly with the number of defects, instead of linearly with the total system length for the conventional approach. We show that the scaling of the calculation time of the Green's function depends on the defect density of a random test system. Furthermore, we discuss the calculation time and the memory requirement of the whole transport formalism applied to defective carbon nanotubes

Electronic transport in metallic carbon nanotubes with mixed defects within the strong localization regime

We study the electron transport in metallic carbon nanotubes (CNTs) with realistic defects of different types. We focus on large CNTs with many defects in the mesoscopic range. In a recent paper we demonstrated that the electronic transport in those defective CNTs is in the regime of strong localization. We verify by quantum transport simulations that the localization length of CNTs with defects of mixed types can be related to the localization lengths of CNTs with identical defects by taking the weighted harmonic average. Secondly, we show how to use this result to estimate the conductance of arbitrary defective CNTs, avoiding time consuming transport calculations

Influence of defect-induced deformations on electron transport in carbon nanotubes

We theoretically investigate the influence of defect-induced long-range deformations in carbon nanotubes on their electronic transport properties. To this end we perform numerical ab-initio calculations using a density-functional-based tight-binding (DFTB) model for various tubes with vacancies. The geometry optimization leads to a change of the atomic positions. There is a strong reconstruction of the atoms near the defect (called "distortion") and there is an additional long-range deformation. The impact of both structural features on the conductance is systematically investigated. We compare short and long CNTs of different kinds with and without long-range deformation. We find for the very thin (9,0)-CNT that the long-range deformation additionally affects the transmission spectrum and the conductance compared to the short-range lattice distortion. The conductance of the larger (11,0)- or the (14,0)-CNT is overall less affected implying that the influence of the long-range deformation decreases with increasing tube diameter. Furthermore, the effect can be either positive or negative depending on the CNT type and the defect type. Our results indicate that the long-range deformation must be included in order to reliably describe the electronic structure of defective, small-diameter zigzag tubes.Comment: Materials for Advanced Metallization 201

Morphology Control of Ordered Mesoporous Carbons for High Capacity Lithium Sulfur Batteries

The focus of this thesis concerns the morphology control of ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) materials. Ordered mesoporous carbons with diverse morphologies, that are thin films, fibers – embedded in anodic alumina membranes and free-standing – or spherical nanoparticles, have been successfully prepared by soft-templating procedures. The mechanisms of structure formation and processing were investigated with in-situ SAXS measurements and their application in high capacity lithium-sulfur batteries was successfully tested in cooperation with Guang He and Linda Nazar from the University of Waterloo in Canada. The Li-S batteries receive increasing attention due to their high theoretical energy density which is 3 to 5 times higher than from lithium-ion batteries. For this type of battery the specific pore volume is crucial for the content of the active component (sulfur) in the cathode and therefore correlates with the capacity and gravimetric energy density of the battery. At first, mesoporous thin films with 2D-hexagonal structure were obtained through organic-organic self-assembly of a preformed oligomeric resol precursor and the triblock copolymer template Pluronic P123. The formation of a condensed-wall material through thermopolymerization of the precursor oligomers resulted in mesostructured phenolic resin films. Subsequent decomposition of the surfactant and partial carbonization were achieved through thermal treatment in inert atmosphere. The films were crack-free with tunable homogenous thicknesses, and showed either 2D-hexagonal or lamellar mesostructure. An additional, yet unknown 3D-mesostructure was also found. In the second part, cubic and circular hexagonal mesoporous carbon phases in the confined environment of tubular anodic alumina membrane (AAM) pores were obtained by self-assembly of the mentioned resol precursor and the triblock copolymer templates Pluronic F127 or P123, respectively. Casting and solvent-evaporation were also followed by thermopolymerization, thermal decomposition of the surfactant and carbonization through thermal treatment at temperatures up to 1000 °C in an inert atmosphere. For both structures the AAM pores were completely filled and no shrinkage was observed, due to strong adhesion of the carbon wall material to the AAM pore walls. As a consequence of this restricted shrinkage effect, the mesophase system stayed almost constant even after thermal treatment at 1000 °C, and pore sizes of up to 20 nm were obtained. In the third part, the aforementioned mesoporous films and embedded fibers in AAMs were further investigated concerning structure formation and carbonization in an in-situ SAXS study. The in-situ measurements revealed that for both systems the structure formation occurs during the thermopolymerization step. Therefore the process of structure formation differs significantly from the known evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA) and may rather be viewed as thermally-induced self-assembly. As a result, the structural evolution strongly depends on the chosen temperature, which controls both the rate of the mesostructure formation and the spatial dimensions of the resulting mesophase. In the fourth part the syntheses recipes for AAMs were applied on a presynthesized silica template for synthesis of freestanding mesoporous carbon nanofibers. The syntheses start with casting of carbon nanofibers with a silica precursor solution leading to a porous silica template after calcination with tubular pores mimicking the initial carbon nanofibers. A synthesis concept using triconstituent coassembly of resol, tetraethylorthosilicate as additional silica precursor and Pluronic F127 was applied here. The silica from the additional precursor was found to be beneficial, due to reduced shrinkage and created additional porosity after etching it. Those OMC nanofibers therefore exhibited a very large surface area and a high pore volume of 2486 m2/g and 2.06 cm3/g, respectively. Due to their extremely high porosity values, those fibers were successfully applied as sulfur host and electrode material in lithium-sulfur batteries. The fifth and last part focuses on the synthesis of spherical mesoporous carbon nanoparticles. Therefore the triconstituent coassembly was applied on a silica template with spherical pores, which was derived from the opal structure of colloidal crystals made from 400 nm PMMA spheres. The spherical ordered mesoporous carbon nanoparticles feature extremely high inner porosity of 2.32 cm3/g and 2445 m2/g, respectively They were successfully applied as cathode material in Li-S batteries, where they showed high reversible capacity up to 1200 mAh/g and good cycle efficiency. The final product consists of spherical mesoporous carbon particles with a diameter of around 300 nm and 2D-hexagonal porosity. The particles could be completely separated by sonification to form stable colloidal suspensions. This could be the base for further applications such drug delivery

HMM Logos for visualization of protein families

BACKGROUND: Profile Hidden Markov Models (pHMMs) are a widely used tool for protein family research. Up to now, however, there exists no method to visualize all of their central aspects graphically in an intuitively understandable way. RESULTS: We present a visualization method that incorporates both emission and transition probabilities of the pHMM, thus extending sequence logos introduced by Schneider and Stephens. For each emitting state of the pHMM, we display a stack of letters. The stack height is determined by the deviation of the position's letter emission frequencies from the background frequencies. The stack width visualizes both the probability of reaching the state (the hitting probability) and the expected number of letters the state emits during a pass through the model (the state's expected contribution). A web interface offering online creation of HMM Logos and the corresponding source code can be found at the Logos web server of the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics . CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrate that HMM Logos can be a useful tool for the biologist: We use them to highlight differences between two homologous subfamilies of GTPases, Rab and Ras, and we show that they are able to indicate structural elements of Ras