Polymer nanocomposites reinforced with montmorillonite

Purpose: Light microscope with polarized light has been used for observation layered zone, visible thanks to polarization of the light, inside polymer-polymer composites and nanocomposites Aim of work has been concentrated on investigation of nanocomposites as promising engineering materials, basing on composition of polypropylene and montmorillonite as reinforcement in the shape of nanoparticles of 2:1 silicate. Design/methodology/approach: Conventional and non-conventional injection molding process has been used for obtaining nanocomposites. In non-conventional process has been used the special mold for inducing the shear rates, additionally equipped with external computer to control melt manipulation of solidifying polymer inside mold cavity Findings: Highly developed structure consisted of multilayer zone between skin and core mainly responsible for reinforcement and improvement of fracture toughness of polymer composites and nanocomposites Research limitations/implications: Nanocomposites of polymer blends and montmorillonite were moulded by direct injection moulding according to melt temperature and stroke time-number combination included in design of experiments. Practical implications: Application of special injection moulding technique provides to structure development and gives possibility to create multilayer zone, which strengthen material. Besides strengthening obtaining of such nanocomposites is cheap thanks to application of low cost injection moulding technique and not expensive polyolefines with developed structure, without using additional fillers (e.g. compatybilizers). Originality/value: Very wide application of polymer composites and nanocomposites as engineering materials used for various industries like building engineering, automotive and aerospace.- (undefined

Experimental Extraction of Secure Correlations from a Noisy Private State

We report experimental generation of a noisy entangled four-photon state that exhibits a separation between the secure key contents and distillable entanglement, a hallmark feature of the recently established quantum theory of private states. The privacy analysis, based on the full tomographic reconstruction of the prepared state, is utilized in a proof-of-principle key generation. The inferiority of distillation-based strategies to extract the key is exposed by an implementation of an entanglement distillation protocol for the produced state.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, final versio

How to hide a secret direction

We present a procedure to share a secret spatial direction in the absence of a common reference frame using a multipartite quantum state. The procedure guarantees that the parties can determine the direction if they perform joint measurements on the state, but fail to do so if they restrict themselves to local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We calculate the fidelity for joint measurements, give bounds on the fidelity achievable by LOCC, and prove that there is a non-vanishing gap between the two of them, even in the limit of infinitely many copies. The robustness of the procedure under particle loss is also studied. As a by-product we find bounds on the probability of discriminating by LOCC between the invariant subspaces of total angular momentum N/2 and N/2-1 in a system of N elementary spins.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figur

Antireflection silicon structures with hydrophobic property fabricated by three-beam laser interference

This paper demonstrates antireflective structures on silicon wafer surfaces with hydrophobic property fabricated by three-beam laser interference. In this work, a three-beam laser interference system was set up to generate periodic micro-nano hole structures with hexagonal distributions. Compared with the existing technologies, the array of hexagonally-distributed hole structures fabricated by three-beam laser interference reveals a design guideline to achieve considerably low solar-weighted reflectance (SWR) in the wavelength range of 300-780 nm. The resulting periodic hexagonally-distributed hole structures have shown extremely low SWR (1.86%) and relatively large contact angle (140°) providing with a self-cleaning capability on the solar cell surface

Pumped-Up SU(1,1) interferometry

Although SU(1,1) interferometry achieves Heisenberg-limited sensitivities, it suffers from one major drawback: Only those particles outcoupled from the pump mode contribute to the phase measurement. Since the number of particles outcoupled to these “side modes” is typically small, this limits the interferometer’s absolute sensitivity. We propose an alternative “pumped-up” approach where all the input particles participate in the phase measurement and show how this can be implemented in spinor Bose-Einstein condensates and hybrid atom-light systems—both of which have experimentally realized SU(1,1) interferometry. We demonstrate that pumped-up schemes are capable of surpassing the shot-noise limit with respect to the total number of input particles and are never worse than conventional SU(1,1) interferometry. Finally, we show that pumped-up schemes continue to excel—both absolutely and in comparison to conventional SU(1,1) interferometry—in the presence of particle losses, poor particle-resolution detection, and noise on the relative phase difference between the two side modes. Pumped-up SU(1,1) interferometry therefore pushes the advantages of conventional SU(1,1) interferometry into the regime of high absolute sensitivity, which is a necessary condition for useful quantum-enhanced devices

TEM investigations of laser texturized polycrystalline silicon solar cell

Purpose: The presented in this paper research results concern investigation of phase transformation of the surface structure of polycrystalline silicon solar cell. The surface of boron doped polycrystalline silicon wafers were texturised by means of diode-pumped pulsed neodymium-doped yttrium aluminium garnet laser crystal (Nd:YAG). Investigations were carried out on transmission electron microscope (TEM) to observe the changes that occurred after laser treatment of the surface layer. Changes in microstructure of the surface layer of solar cells under the influence of the laser beam are presented using the analysis phase and dislocations present in the microstructure. Observations were carried out on prepared thin foils. Moreover, diffraction patterns from selected regions of textured wafers were solved to qualify phase transformations under influence of laser beam. Design/methodology/approach: Investigations were carried out on the Transmission Electron Microscope JEM 3010 supplied by JEOL with 300 kV accelerating voltage equipped with an electronic camera configured with a computer. The microstructure was obtained in the bright field image as well dark field working in a magnification range of 10000x to ca. 100000x. Phases identification was performed by means of selected area diffraction (SAD) method, where for diffraction pattern calculations the computer software “Eldyf” was used, kindly supplied by the Institute of Materials Science, University of Silesia. Findings: The research included analyze of the influence of laser treatment conditions on geometry, roughness and size of laser made surface texture of silicon wafer applied for solar cells. Research limitations/implications: Paper contributes to research on silicon surface processing using laser beam. Practical implications: Conducted investigations may be applied in optimisation process of solar cell surface processing. Originality/value: The range of possible applications increases for example as materials for solar cells placed on building constructions, elements in electronics and construction parts in automobile industry

Quantum states made to measure

Recent progress in manipulating quantum states of light and matter brings quantum-enhanced measurements closer to prospective applications. The current challenge is to make quantum metrologic strategies robust against imperfections.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, Commentary for Nature Photonic

Influence of Incubation Conditions on Hydrolysis Efficiency and Iodine Enrichment in Baker’s Yeast

The influence of incubation conditions, enzyme type, hydrolysis time, and potassium iodide concentration on hydrolysis and iodine enrichment were studied in supernatant and pellets of Saccharomyces cervisiae hydrolysates. The type of enzyme used and incubation time significantly influence hydrolysis efficiency and protein concentration in supernatant and pellet. The highest protein hydrolysis efficiency was obtained by 24-h incubation with papain. Significantly lower values were observed for pepsin and autolysis. The potassium iodide concentration influences the iodine content of supernatant and pellet, but not hydrolysis. Iodide enrichment of supernatant and pellet depends on the concentration of iodide using during incubation. High concentration of iodide and long incubation times were the conditions for optimal iodide enrichment and high-protein hydrolysates. The optimal hydrolysis efficiency and iodine enrichment were obtained during 24-h incubation with papain in a 4.5-mM potassium iodide medium. The efficiency reached 98.22% with iodine concentrations of 2,664.91 and 9,200.67 μg/g iodine in pellet and supernatant, respectively

General framework for estimating the ultimate precision limit in noisy quantum-enhanced metrology

The estimation of parameters characterizing dynamical processes is central to science and technology. The estimation error changes with the number N of resources employed in the experiment (which could quantify, for instance, the number of probes or the probing energy). Typically, it scales as 1/N^(1/2). Quantum strategies may improve the precision, for noiseless processes, by an extra factor 1/N^(1/2). For noisy processes, it is not known in general if and when this improvement can be achieved. Here we propose a general framework for obtaining attainable and useful lower bounds for the ultimate limit of precision in noisy systems. We apply this bound to lossy optical interferometry and atomic spectroscopy in the presence of dephasing, showing that it captures the main features of the transition from the 1/N to the 1/N^(1/2) behaviour as N increases, independently of the initial state of the probes, and even with use of adaptive feedback.Comment: Published in Nature Physics. This is the revised submitted version. The supplementary material can be found at http://www.nature.com/nphys/journal/v7/n5/extref/nphys1958-s1.pd