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Reciprocal salt flux growth of LiFePO4 single crystals with controlled defect concentrations
Improved methods for the flux growth of single crystals of the important battery material LiFePO4 have been developed, allowing the facile preparation of single crystals up to 1 cm across with well-developed facets at relatively low temperatures. The structural characterization of these samples by both powder X-ray diffraction and single crystal diffraction (X-ray and neutron) indicates that the samples are typically stoichiometric with a very low concentration of Fe defects on the Li site, though crystals with larger concentrations of defects can be specifically grown using Fe-rich fluxes. These defects occur through the formation of a Fe-rich (Li1-2xFe x)FePO4 partial solid solution, in contrast to the antisite defects more commonly discussed in the literature which would preserve the ideal LiFePO4 stoichiometry. The LiFePO4 defects are shown to be sarcopside-like (2 Li+ → Fe2+ + vacancy) based on compositions refined from single crystal diffraction data, the observed dependence of unit cell parameters on defect concentration, and their observed phase behavior (defects only appear in growths from fluxes which are Fe-rich relative to stoichiometric LiFePO4). The distribution of defects has been studied by aberration corrected scanning transmission electron microscopy and was found to be highly inhomogenous, suggesting that defect-containing crystals may consist of endotaxial intergrowths of olivine LiFePO4 and sarcopside Fe3(PO4)2 in a manner that minimizes the detrimental influence of FeLi defects on the rate of Li-ion transport within crystallites. © 2013 American Chemical Society
Monte Carlo Simulation of the Short-time Behaviour of the Dynamic XY Model
Dynamic relaxation of the XY model quenched from a high temperature state to
the critical temperature or below is investigated with Monte Carlo methods.
When a non-zero initial magnetization is given, in the short-time regime of the
dynamic evolution the critical initial increase of the magnetization is
observed. The dynamic exponent is directly determined. The results
show that the exponent varies with respect to the temperature.
Furthermore, it is demonstrated that this initial increase of the magnetization
is universal, i.e. independent of the microscopic details of the initial
configurations and the algorithms.Comment: 14 pages with 5 figures in postscrip
Temperature dependence of the electronic structure of semiconductors and insulators
The renormalization of electronic eigenenergies due to electron-phonon
coupling is sizable in many materials with light atoms. This effect, often
neglected in ab-initio calculations, can be computed using the
perturbation-based Allen-Heine-Cardona theory in the adiabatic or non-adiabatic
harmonic approximation. After a short description of the numerous recent
progresses in this field, and a brief overview of the theory, we focus on the
issue of phonon wavevector sampling convergence, until now poorly understood.
Indeed, the renormalization is obtained numerically through a q-point sampling
inside the BZ. For q-points close to G, we show that a divergence due to
non-zero Born effective charge appears in the electron-phonon matrix elements,
leading to a divergence of the integral over the BZ for band extrema. Although
it should vanish for non-polar materials, unphysical residual Born effective
charges are usually present in ab-initio calculations. Here, we propose a
solution that improves the coupled q-point convergence dramatically. For polar
materials, the problem is more severe: the divergence of the integral does not
disappear in the adiabatic harmonic approximation, but only in the
non-adiabatic harmonic approximation. In all cases, we study in detail the
convergence behavior of the renormalization as the q-point sampling goes to
infinity and the imaginary broadening parameter goes to zero. This allows
extrapolation, thus enabling a systematic way to converge the renormalization
for both polar and non-polar materials. Finally, the adiabatic and
non-adiabatic theory, with corrections for the divergence problem, are applied
to the study of five semiconductors and insulators: a-AlN, b-AlN, BN, diamond
and silicon. For these five materials, we present the zero-point
renormalization, temperature dependence, phonon-induced lifetime broadening and
the renormalized electronic bandstructure.Comment: 27 pages and 26 figure
Loop Corrections to Cosmological Perturbations in Multi-field Inflationary Models
We investigate one-loop quantum corrections to the power spectrum of
adiabatic perturbation from entropy modes/adiabatic mode cross-interactions in
multiple DBI inflationary models. We find that due to the non-canonical kinetic
term in DBI models, the loop corrections are enhanced by slow-varying parameter
and small sound speed . Thus, in general the loop-corrections
in multi-DBI models can be large. Moreover, we find that the loop-corrections
from adiabatic/entropy cross-interaction vertices are IR finite.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures; v2, typos corrected, ref added; v3 typos
corrected, version for publishing in jca
Integrated impedance bridge for absolute capacitance measurements at cryogenic temperatures and finite magnetic fields
We developed an impedance bridge that operates at cryogenic temperatures
(down to 60 mK) and in perpendicular magnetic fields up to at least 12 T. This
is achieved by mounting a GaAs HEMT amplifier perpendicular to a printed
circuit board containing the device under test and thereby parallel to the
magnetic field. The measured amplitude and phase of the output signal allows
for the separation of the total impedance into an absolute capacitance and a
resistance. Through a detailed noise characterization, we find that the best
resolution is obtained when operating the HEMT amplifier at the highest gain.
We obtained a resolution in the absolute capacitance of
6.4~aF at 77 K on a comb-drive actuator, while maintaining
a small excitation amplitude of 15~. We show the magnetic field
functionality of our impedance bridge by measuring the quantum Hall plateaus of
a top-gated hBN/graphene/hBN heterostructure at 60~mK with a probe signal of
12.8~.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figure
Collision broadening of rho meson in a dropping mass scenario
Vector mesons containing light quarks are thought to have their masses
reduced in dense nuclear matter, sacrificing some of their energy to the scalar
field which becomes appreciable at finite baryon density. Model calculations
find masses which fall by a couple tens of percents in normal nuclear matter,
and by several hundred MeV in dense matter. We estimate the collision rate for
rho mesons in such a scenario and at finite temperature. Compared to its
free-mass value, the collision rate changes by nearly a factor of two both
above and below, depending on the density. This collision broadening effect
could be important for estimates of low-mass dilepton production in heavy-ion
collisions.Comment: 8 pages LaTeX, 2 PostScript figure
Integer quantum Hall transition in the presence of a long-range-correlated quenched disorder
We theoretically study the effect of long-ranged inhomogeneities on the
critical properties of the integer quantum Hall transition. For this purpose we
employ the real-space renormalization-group (RG) approach to the network model
of the transition. We start by testing the accuracy of the RG approach in the
absence of inhomogeneities, and infer the correlation length exponent nu=2.39
from a broad conductance distribution. We then incorporate macroscopic
inhomogeneities into the RG procedure. Inhomogeneities are modeled by a smooth
random potential with a correlator which falls off with distance as a power
law, r^{-alpha}. Similar to the classical percolation, we observe an
enhancement of nu with decreasing alpha. Although the attainable system sizes
are large, they do not allow one to unambiguously identify a cusp in the
nu(alpha) dependence at alpha_c=2/nu, as might be expected from the extended
Harris criterion. We argue that the fundamental obstacle for the numerical
detection of a cusp in the quantum percolation is the implicit randomness in
the Aharonov-Bohm phases of the wave functions. This randomness emulates the
presence of a short-range disorder alongside the smooth potential.Comment: 10 pages including 6 figures, revised version as accepted for
publication in PR
Giant Gravitons in type IIA PP-wave Background
We examine giant gravitons with a worldvolume magnetic flux in type IIA
pp-wave background and find that they can move away from the origin along
direction in target space satisfying . This nontrivial relation can be
regarded as a complementary relation of the giant graviton on IIA pp-wave and
is shown to be connected to the spacetime uncertainty principle. The giant
graviton is also investigated in a system of N D0-branes as a fuzzy sphere
solution. It is observed that enters into the fuzzy algebra as a
deformation parameter. Such a background dependent Myers effect guarantees that
we again get the crucial relation of our giant graviton. In the paper, we also
find a BIon configuration on the giant graviton in this background.Comment: 10 pages, no figure, content added, typo corrected, reference adde
Long-lived photoexcited states in polydiacetylenes with different molecular and supramolecular organization
With the aim of determining the importance of the molecular and supramolecular organization on the excited states of polydiacetylenes, we have studied the photoinduced absorption spectra of the red form of poly[1,6-bis(3,6-didodecyl-N-carbazolyl)-2,4-hexadiyne] (polyDCHD-S) and the results compared with those of the blue form of the same polymer. An interpretation of the data is given in terms of both the conjugation length and the interbackbone separation also in relation to the photoinduced absorption spectra of both blue and red forms of poly[1,6-bis(N-carbazolyl)-2,4-hexadiyne] (polyDCHD), which does not carry the alkyl substituents on the carbazolyl side groups. Information on the above properties is derived from the analysis of the absorption and Raman spectra of this class of polydiacetylenes
Optimal strategies for continuous gravitational wave detection in pulsar timing arrays
Supermassive black hole binaries (SMBHBs) are expected to emit continuous
gravitational waves in the pulsar timing array (PTA) frequency band
(-- Hz). The development of data analysis techniques aimed at
efficient detection and characterization of these signals is critical to the
gravitational wave detection effort. In this paper we leverage methods
developed for LIGO continuous wave gravitational searches, and explore the use
of the -statistic for such searches in pulsar timing data. Babak &
Sesana 2012 have already used this approach in the context of PTAs to show that
one can resolve multiple SMBHB sources in the sky. Our work improves on several
aspects of prior continuous wave search methods developed for PTA data
analysis. The algorithm is implemented fully in the time domain, which
naturally deals with the irregular sampling typical of PTA data and avoids
spectral leakage problems associated with frequency domain methods. We take
into account the fitting of the timing model, and have generalized our approach
to deal with both correlated and uncorrelated colored noise sources. We also
develop an incoherent detection statistic that maximizes over all pulsar
dependent contributions to the likelihood. To test the effectiveness and
sensitivity of our detection statistics, we perform a number of monte-carlo
simulations. We produce sensitivity curves for PTAs of various configurations,
and outline an implementation of a fully functional data analysis pipeline.
Finally, we present a derivation of the likelihood maximized over the
gravitational wave phases at the pulsar locations, which results in a vast
reduction of the search parameter space.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figure
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