104 research outputs found
Carbon Nanotube and Cellulose Nanocrystal Hybrid Films
The use of cellulose nanocrystals (CNC) in high performance coatings is attractive for micro-scale structures or device fabrication due to the anisotropic geometry, however CNC are insulating materials. Carbon nanotubes (CNT) are also rod-shaped nanomaterials that display high mechanical strength and electrical conductivity. The hydrophobic regions of surface-modified CNC can interact with hydrophobic CNT and aid in association between the two anisotropic nanomaterials. The long-range electrostatic repulsion of CNC plays a role in forming a stable CNT and CNC mixture dispersion in water, which is integral to forming a uniform hybrid film. At concentrations favorable for film formation, the multiwalled nanotubes + CNC mixture dispersion shows cellular network formation, indicating local phase separation, while the single-walled nanotube + CNC mixture dispersion shows schlieren texture, indicating liquid crystal mixture formation. Conductive CNT + CNC hybrid films (5–20 μm thick) were cast on glass microscope slides with and without shear by blade coating. The CNT + CNC hybrid films electrical conductivity increased with increasing CNT loadings and some anisotropy was observed with the sheared hybrid films, although to a lesser extent than what was anticipated. Percolation models were applied to model the hybrid film conductivity and correlate with the hybrid film microstructure
Brief Announcement: Building Fast Recoverable Persistent Data Structures with Montage
The recent emergence of fast, dense, nonvolatile main memory suggests that certain long-lived data structures might remain in their natural, pointer-rich format across program runs and hardware reboots. Operations on such structures must be instrumented with explicit write-back and fence instructions to ensure consistency in the wake of a crash. Techniques to minimize the cost of this instrumentation are an active topic of current research.
We present what we believe to be the first general-purpose approach to building buffered durably linearizable persistent data structures, and a system, Montage, to support that approach. Montage is built on top of the Ralloc nonblocking persistent allocator. It employs a slow-ticking epoch clock, and ensures that no operation appears to span an epoch boundary. If a crash occurs in epoch e, all work performed in epochs e and e-1 is lost, but all work from prior epochs is preserved.
We describe the implementation of Montage, argue its correctness, and report on experiments confirming excellent performance for operations on queues, sets/mappings, and general graphs
Fast Nonblocking Persistence for Concurrent Data Structures
We present a fully lock-free variant of our recent Montage system for persistent data structures. The variant, nbMontage, adds persistence to almost any nonblocking concurrent structure without introducing significant overhead or blocking of any kind. Like its predecessor, nbMontage is buffered durably linearizable: it guarantees that the state recovered in the wake of a crash will represent a consistent prefix of pre-crash execution. Unlike its predecessor, nbMontage ensures wait-free progress of the persistence frontier, thereby bounding the number of recent updates that may be lost on a crash, and allowing a thread to force an update of the frontier (i.e., to perform a sync operation) without the risk of blocking. As an extra benefit, the helping mechanism employed by our wait-free sync significantly reduces its latency.
Performance results for nonblocking queues, skip lists, trees, and hash tables rival custom data structures in the literature - dramatically faster than achieved with prior general-purpose systems, and generally within 50% of equivalent non-persistent structures placed in DRAM
Natural Inflation, Planck Scale Physics and Oscillating Primordial Spectrum
In the ``natural inflation'' model, the inflaton potential is periodic. We
show that Planck scale physics may induce corrections to the inflaton
potential, which is also periodic with a greater frequency. Such high frequency
corrections produce oscillating features in the primordial fluctuation power
spectrum, which are not entirely excluded by the current observations and may
be detectable in high precision data of cosmic microwave background (CMB)
anisotropy and large scale structure (LSS) observations.Comment: 20 pages, 11 figures. To appear in Int J Mod. Phys.
On A Cosmological Invariant as an Observational Probe in the Early Universe
k-essence scalar field models are usually taken to have lagrangians of the
form with some general function of
. Under certain conditions this lagrangian
in the context of the early universe can take the form of that of an oscillator
with time dependent frequency. The Ermakov invariant for a time dependent
oscillator in a cosmological scenario then leads to an invariant quadratic form
involving the Hubble parameter and the logarithm of the scale factor. In
principle, this invariant can lead to further observational probes for the
early universe. Moreover, if such an invariant can be observationally verified
then the presence of dark energy will also be indirectly confirmed.Comment: 4 pages, Revte
Testing the Lorentz and CPT Symmetry with CMB polarizations and a non-relativistic Maxwell Theory
We present a model for a system involving a photon gauge field and a scalar
field at quantum criticality in the frame of a Lifthitz-type non-relativistic
Maxwell theory. We will show this model gives rise to Lorentz and CPT violation
which leads to a frequency-dependent rotation of polarization plane of
radiations, and so leaves potential signals on the cosmic microwave background
temperature and polarization anisotropies.Comment: 7 pages, 2 figures, accepted on JCAP, a few references adde
Fermionic partner of Quintessence field as candidate for dark matter
Quintessence is a possible candidate for dark energy. In this paper we study
the phenomenologies of the fermionic partner of Quintessence, the Quintessino.
Our results show that, for suitable choices of the model parameters, the
Quintessino is a good candidate for cold or warm dark matter. In our scenario,
dark energy and dark matter of the Universe are connected in one chiral
superfield.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, version to appear in PR
Quintessence and Spontaneous Leptogenesis
We propose in this paper a scenario of spontaneous baryogenesis in
cosmological models of Quintessence by introducing a derivative coupling of the
Quintessence scalar to the baryon current or the current of the
baryon number minus lepton number . We find that with a
dimension-5 operator suppressed by the Planck
mass or the Grand Unification Scale , baryon number asymmetry
can be naturally explained {\it via} leptogenesis. We
study also the isocurvature baryon number fluctuation generated in our model.Comment: 7pages,1figur
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