Electrical properties and AC susceptibility of CdTe added Tl2Ba2CaCu2O8-δ superconductor

Information on semiconductor/superconductor interface is important in fabricating devices of such hybrid systems. In this paper the electrical properties and AC susceptibility of Tl2Ba2CaCu2O8 (Tl-2212) superconductor added with CdTe semiconductor are reported. Samples with nominal starting composition Tl2Ba2CaCu2O8(CdTe)x with x = 0 to 0.20 weight percent (wt. %) have been prepared by the solid-state reaction method. X-ray diffraction patterns showed essentially the Tl-2212 phase with presence of impurities (CuO and Tl2Ba2CuO6) for x ≥ 0.05 wt. % but did not change the Tl-2212 structure which is tetragonal with lattice parameter a = b ≠ c. The critical onset temperature, Tc-onset for all samples was between 104 and 108 K while the critical zero resistance temperature, Tc-zero was from 93 to 95 K. The superconducting transition determined by AC susceptibility measurement showed Tcχ’ between 101 and 103 K. The peak temperature, Tp of the imaginary part of the susceptibility χ” decreased for x = 0.05 and then increased for x > 0.05. This indicated that the superconducting grains were strongly coupled for x > 0.05 as a result of CdTe addition. The intergrain critical current density, Jc at Tp for the x = 0.2 sample Jc (Tp = 95 K) = 23 A cm-2 was the highest among all samples. This sample also showed the highest Tp indicating CdTe improved the flux pinning of the Tl-2212 phase. This result can be useful in the fabrication of semiconductor/superconductor (Tl-2212) hybrid devices

Impact of opioid-free analgesia on pain severity and patient satisfaction after discharge from surgery: multispecialty, prospective cohort study in 25 countries

Background: Balancing opioid stewardship and the need for adequate analgesia following discharge after surgery is challenging. This study aimed to compare the outcomes for patients discharged with opioid versus opioid-free analgesia after common surgical procedures.Methods: This international, multicentre, prospective cohort study collected data from patients undergoing common acute and elective general surgical, urological, gynaecological, and orthopaedic procedures. The primary outcomes were patient-reported time in severe pain measured on a numerical analogue scale from 0 to 100% and patient-reported satisfaction with pain relief during the first week following discharge. Data were collected by in-hospital chart review and patient telephone interview 1 week after discharge.Results: The study recruited 4273 patients from 144 centres in 25 countries; 1311 patients (30.7%) were prescribed opioid analgesia at discharge. Patients reported being in severe pain for 10 (i.q.r. 1-30)% of the first week after discharge and rated satisfaction with analgesia as 90 (i.q.r. 80-100) of 100. After adjustment for confounders, opioid analgesia on discharge was independently associated with increased pain severity (risk ratio 1.52, 95% c.i. 1.31 to 1.76; P < 0.001) and re-presentation to healthcare providers owing to side-effects of medication (OR 2.38, 95% c.i. 1.36 to 4.17; P = 0.004), but not with satisfaction with analgesia (beta coefficient 0.92, 95% c.i. -1.52 to 3.36; P = 0.468) compared with opioid-free analgesia. Although opioid prescribing varied greatly between high-income and low- and middle-income countries, patient-reported outcomes did not.Conclusion: Opioid analgesia prescription on surgical discharge is associated with a higher risk of re-presentation owing to side-effects of medication and increased patient-reported pain, but not with changes in patient-reported satisfaction. Opioid-free discharge analgesia should be adopted routinely

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

AC susceptibility and electrical properties of rare-earth- and alkali metal-substituted (Tl0.7M0.3)Sr2CaCu2O7 with M = Er, Gd, La, Na, K and Rb

The effects of rare-earth elements M = Er, Gd and La, and alkali metals M = Na, K and Rb substitution on (Tl0.7M0.3)Sr2CaCu2O7 (Tl-1212) are reported. The rare-earth elements were chosen by considering the ionic radius, i.e., from the smallest (Er+3) to the largest (La+3) ion. The samples were prepared via the solid-state reaction method. X-ray diffraction patterns showed the presence of major Tl-1212 and minor Tl-1201 and Ca0.3Sr0.7CuO2 phase in almost all samples. The resistance versus temperature curves for the rare-earth-substituted samples showed onset temperature between 87 and 90 K and zero resistance temperature between 69 and 81 K. Alkali metal substitutions exhibited Tl-1212 phase but showed no superconducting transition although the electrical resistivity was much lower than the rare-earth-substituted samples. AC susceptibility measurement showed superconducting transition Tcχ, between 59 and 80 K for the rare-earth element-substituted samples. The average grain size, the transition temperature, Tcχ and the peak temperature Tp of the imaginary part of the susceptibility χ″ decreased as the ionic radius of the rare earths was reduced

Abstracts of the International Halal Science Conference 2023

This book presents the extended abstracts of the selected contributions to the International Halal Science Conference, held on 22-23 August 2023 by the International Institute for Halal Research and Training (INHART), IIUM, Malaysia in collaboration with Halalan Thayyiban Research Centre, University Islam Sultan Sharif (UNISSA), Brunei Darussalam. With the increasing global interest in halal products and services, this conference is timely. Conference Title:  International Halal Science ConferenceConference Acronym: IHASC23Conference Theme: Halal Industry Sustainability Through ScienceConference Date: 22-23 August 2023Conference Venue: International Islamic University (IIUM), MalaysiaConference Organizer: International Institute for Halal Research and Training (INHART), International Islamic University (IIUM), Malaysi