Study protocol of the iMPaCT project : A longitudinal cohort study assessing psychological determinants, sexual behaviour and chlamydia (re)infections in heterosexual STI clinic visitors

Acknowledgements We are grateful to the staff at the STI clinics of Amsterdam, Kennemerland, Hollands Noorden, Twente, who are involved in the recruitment and data collection of participants, and Marlous Ratten and Klazien Visser from Soapoli-online, who are involved in the coordination of laboratory testing of the home-based sampling kits at six-month follow-up. We also thank the staff at the STI department at the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, especially Birgit van Benthem. Funding This project is funded by the Strategic Programme (SPR) of the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment (RIVM) (project number S/113004/01/IP). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Availability of data and materials The dataset (anonymised) generated during this study will be made available for interested parties on request.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Revealing the nanoparticles aspect ratio in the glass-metal nanocomposites irradiated with femtosecond laser

We studied a femtosecond laser shaping of silver nanoparticles embedded in soda-lime glass. Comparing experimental absorption spectra with the modeling based on Maxwell Garnett approximation modified for spheroidal inclusions, we obtained the mean aspect ratio of the re-shaped silver nanoparticles as a function of the laser fluence. We demonstrated that under our experimental conditions the spherical shape of silver nanoparticles changed to a prolate spheroid with the aspect ratio as high as 3.5 at the laser fluence of 0.6J/cm2. The developed approach can be employed to control the anisotropy of the glass-metal composites