Interfacial Interactions between Carbon Nanoparticles and Conjugated Polymers

Conjugated polymer based electronics, a type of flexible electronic devices, can be produced from solution by traditional printing and coating processes in a roll-to-roll format such as papers and graphic films. This shows great promise for the emerging energy generation and conversion. The device performance of polymer electronics is largely dependent of crystalline structures and morphology of photoactive layers. However, the solution crystallization kinetics of conjugated polymers in the presence of electron acceptor nanoparticles has not been fully understood yet. In this study, solution crystallization kinetics of poly (3-hexylthiophene) in the presence of carbon nanotubes and graphene oxide has been investigated by using UV-visible absorption spectroscopy and transmission electron microscope. Various kinetics parameters such as crystallization temperature, polymer solution concentration and nanoparticle loading will be discussed. The crystallization rate law and fold surface free energy will be addressed by using polymer crystallization theory of heterogeneous nucleation. This fundamental study will provide a foundation of fabricating high efficiency polymer based electronics

Periplasmic biomineralization for semi-artificial photosynthesis

Semiconductor-based biointerfaces are typically established either on the surface of the plasma membrane or within the cytoplasm. In Gram-negative bacteria, the periplasmic space, characterized by its confinement and the presence of numerous enzymes and peptidoglycans, offers additional opportunities for biomineralization, allowing for nongenetic modulation interfaces. We demonstrate semiconductor nanocluster precipitation containing single- and multiple-metal elements within the periplasm, as observed through various electron- and x-ray-based imaging techniques. The periplasmic semiconductors are metastable and display defect-dominant fluorescent properties. Unexpectedly, the defect-rich (i.e., the low-grade) semiconductor nanoclusters produced in situ can still increase adenosine triphosphate levels and malate production when coupled with photosensitization. We expand the sustainability levels of the biohybrid system to include reducing heavy metals at the primary level, building living bioreactors at the secondary level, and creating semi-artificial photosynthesis at the tertiary level. The biomineralization-enabled periplasmic biohybrids have the potential to serve as defect-tolerant platforms for diverse sustainable applications

Homogenization of Halide Distribution and Carrier Dynamics in Alloyed Organic-Inorganic Perovskites

Perovskite solar cells have shown remarkable efficiencies beyond 22%, through organic and inorganic cation alloying. However, the role of alkali-metal cations is not well-understood. By using synchrotron-based nano-X-ray fluorescence and complementary measurements, we show that when adding RbI and/or CsI the halide distribution becomes homogenous. This homogenization translates into long-lived charge carrier decays, spatially homogenous carrier dynamics visualized by ultrafast microscopy, as well as improved photovoltaic device performance. We find that Rb and K phase-segregate in highly concentrated aggregates. Synchrotron-based X-ray-beam-induced current and electron-beam-induced current of solar cells show that Rb clusters do not contribute to the current and are recombination active. Our findings bring light to the beneficial effects of alkali metal halides in perovskites, and point at areas of weakness in the elemental composition of these complex perovskites, paving the way to improved performance in this rapidly growing family of materials for solar cell applications.Comment: updated author metadat

Skywork: A More Open Bilingual Foundation Model

In this technical report, we present Skywork-13B, a family of large language models (LLMs) trained on a corpus of over 3.2 trillion tokens drawn from both English and Chinese texts. This bilingual foundation model is the most extensively trained and openly published LLMs of comparable size to date. We introduce a two-stage training methodology using a segmented corpus, targeting general purpose training and then domain-specific enhancement training, respectively. We show that our model not only excels on popular benchmarks, but also achieves \emph{state of the art} performance in Chinese language modeling on diverse domains. Furthermore, we propose a novel leakage detection method, demonstrating that test data contamination is a pressing issue warranting further investigation by the LLM community. To spur future research, we release Skywork-13B along with checkpoints obtained during intermediate stages of the training process. We are also releasing part of our SkyPile corpus, a collection of over 150 billion tokens of web text, which is the largest high quality open Chinese pre-training corpus to date. We hope Skywork-13B and our open corpus will serve as a valuable open-source resource to democratize access to high-quality LLMs

An interlaboratory comparison of aerosol inorganic ion measurements by ion chromatography : Implications for aerosol pH estimate

Water-soluble inorganic ions such as ammonium, nitrate and sulfate are major components of fine aerosols in the atmosphere and are widely used in the estimation of aerosol acidity. However, different experimental practices and instrumentation may lead to uncertainties in ion concentrations. Here, an intercomparison experiment was conducted in 10 different laboratories (labs) to investigate the consistency of inorganic ion concentrations and resultant aerosol acidity estimates using the same set of aerosol filter samples. The results mostly exhibited good agreement for major ions Cl-, SO2-4, NO-3, NHC4 and KC. However, F-, Mg2C and Ca2C were observed with more variations across the different labs. The Aerosol Chemical Speciation Monitor (ACSM) data of nonrefractory SO2-4, NO-3 and NHC4 generally correlated very well with the filter-analysis-based data in our study, but the absolute concentrations differ by up to 42 %. Cl-from the two methods are correlated, but the concentration differ by more than a factor of 3. The analyses of certified reference materials (CRMs) generally showed a good detection accuracy (DA) of all ions in all the labs, the majority of which ranged between 90 % and 110 %. The DA was also used to correct the ion concentrations to showcase the importance of using CRMs for calibration check and quality control. Better agreements were found for Cl-, SO2-4, NO-3, NHC4 and KC across the labs after their concentrations were corrected with DA; the coefficient of variation (CV) of Cl-, SO2-4, NO-3, NHC4 and KC decreased by 1.7 %, 3.4 %, 3.4 %, 1.2 % and 2.6 %, respectively, after DA correction. We found that the ratio of anion to cation equivalent concentrations (AE/CE) and ion balance (anions-cations) are not good indicators for aerosol acidity estimates, as the results in different labs did not agree well with each other. In situ aerosol pH calculated from the ISORROPIA II thermodynamic equilibrium model with measured ion and ammonia concentrations showed a similar trend and good agreement across the 10 labs. Our results indicate that although there are important uncertainties in aerosol ion concentration measurements, the estimated aerosol pH from the ISORROPIA II model is more consistent