Reversion phenomena of Cu-Cr alloys

Cu-Cr alloys which were given various aging and reversion treatments were investigated in terms of electrical resistivity and hardness. Transmission electron microscopy was one technique employed. Some results obtained are as follows: the increment of electrical resistivity after the reversion at a constant temperature decreases as the aging temperature rises. In a constant aging condition, the increment of electrical resistivity after the reversion increases, and the time required for a maximum reversion becomes shorter as the reversion temperature rises. The reversion phenomena can be repeated, but its amount decreases rapidly by repetition. At first, the amount of reversion increases with aging time and reaches its maximum, and then tends to decrease again. Hardness changes by the reversion are very small, but the hardness tends to soften slightly. Any changes in transmission electron micrographs by the reversion treatment cannot be detected

Soft-decision Viterbi decoding with diversity combining

Diversity combining methods for convolutional coded and soft-decision Viterbi decoded channels in mobile satellite communications systems are evaluated and it is clarified that the pre-Viterbi-decoding maximal ratio combining shows better performance than other methods in Rician fading channels by computer simulation. A novel practical technique for maximal ratio combining is proposed, in which the coefficients for weighting are derived from soft-decision demodulated signals only. The proposed diversity combining method with soft-decision Viterbi decoding requires simple hardware and shows satisfactory performance with slight degradation of 0.3 dB in Rician fading channels compared with an ideal weighting scheme. Furthermore, this diversity method is applied to trellis coded modulation and significant Pe performance improvement is achieved

Stability and Hermitian-Einstein metrics for vector bundles on framed manifolds

We adapt the notions of stability of holomorphic vector bundles in the sense of Mumford-Takemoto and Hermitian-Einstein metrics in holomorphic vector bundles for canonically polarized framed manifolds, i.e. compact complex manifolds X together with a smooth divisor D such that K_X \otimes [D] is ample. It turns out that the degree of a torsion-free coherent sheaf on X with respect to the polarization K_X \otimes [D] coincides with the degree with respect to the complete K\"ahler-Einstein metric g_{X \setminus D} on X \setminus D. For stable holomorphic vector bundles, we prove the existence of a Hermitian-Einstein metric with respect to g_{X \setminus D} and also the uniqueness in an adapted sense.Comment: 21 pages, International Journal of Mathematics (to appear

Gas pressure sintering of Beta-Sialon with Z=3

An experiment conducted on beta-sialon in atmospheric pressure, using a temperature of 2000 C and 4 MPa nitrogen atmosphere, is described. Thermal decomposition was inhibited by the increase of the nitrogen gas pressure

Direct evaporative cooling of 41K into a Bose-Einstein condensate

We have investigated the collisional properties of 41K atoms at ultracold temperature. To show the possibility to use 41K as a coolant, a Bose-Einstein condensate of 41K atoms in the stretched state (F=2, m_F=2) was created for the first time by direct evaporation in a magnetic trap. An upper bound of three body loss coefficient for atoms in the condensate was determined to be 4(2) 10^{-29} cm -6 s-1. A Feshbach resonance in the F=1, m_F=-1 state was observed at 51.42(5) G, which is in good agreement with theoretical prediction.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Prebiotic Organic Microstructures

Micro- and sub-micrometer spheres, tubules and fiber-filament soft structures have been synthesized in our experiments conducted with 3 MeV proton irradiations of a mixture of simple inorganic constituents, CO, N2 and H2O. We analysed the irradiation products, with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). These laboratory organic structures produced wide variety of proteinous and non-proteinous amino acids after HCl hydrolysis. The enantiomer analysis for D-, L- alanine confirmed that the amino acids were abiotically synthesized during the laboratory experiment. Considering hydrothermal activity, the presence of CO2 and H2, of a ferromagnesian silicate mineral environment, of an Earth magnetic field which was much less intense during Archean times than nowadays and consequently of a proton excitation source which was much more abundant, we propose that our laboratory organic microstructures might be synthesized during Archean times. We show similarities in morphology and in formation with some terrestrial Archean microstructures and we suggest that some of the observed Archean carbon spherical and filamentous microstructures might be composed of abiogenic organic molecules. We further propose a search for such prebiotic organic signatures on Mars. This article has been posted on Nature precedings on 21 July 2010 [1]. Extinct radionuclides as source of excitation have been replaced by cosmic radiations which were much more intense 3.5 Ga ago because of a much less intense Earth magnetic field. The new version of the article has been presented at the ORIGINS conference in Montpellier in july 2011 [2] and has since been published in Origins of Life and Evolution of Biospheres 42 (4) 307-316, 2012. 
DOI: 10.1007/s11084-012-9290-5 

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Complex Line Bundles over Simplicial Complexes and their Applications

Discrete vector bundles are important in Physics and recently found remarkable applications in Computer Graphics. This article approaches discrete bundles from the viewpoint of Discrete Differential Geometry, including a complete classification of discrete vector bundles over finite simplicial complexes. In particular, we obtain a discrete analogue of a theorem of Andr\'e Weil on the classification of hermitian line bundles. Moreover, we associate to each discrete hermitian line bundle with curvature a unique piecewise-smooth hermitian line bundle of piecewise constant curvature. This is then used to define a discrete Dirichlet energy which generalizes the well-known cotangent Laplace operator to discrete hermitian line bundles over Euclidean simplicial manifolds of arbitrary dimension