1,561 research outputs found
The copper-bismuth-sulphur material system and thin film deposition of Cu3BiS3 by sputtering and evaporation for the application of photovoltaic cells
The semiconducting sulphosalt Wittichenite has been identified as a possible absorber material for thin film photovoltaic devices. It has the chemical formula Cu3BiS3 and its component elements are those of low toxicity and high abundance making it a very attractive prospect for photovoltaic devices.
The copper bismuth sulphur material system is not very well understood and information on it limited to a few small regions. To aid understanding of this system a pseudo-binary phase diagram along the CuS-Bi join of the Cu-Bi-S ternary phase diagram was constructed by making bulk samples of various compositions along the join and analysing them using X-ray diffraction and differential scanning calorimetry. This join was chosen because is crosses the point at which Cu3BiS3 would be expected to occur due to its stoichiometry. The CuS-Bi phase diagram shows Cu3BiS3 forms across a wide compositional range but is mixed with either bismuth metal or copper sulphides depending on composition.
Films of Cu3BiS3 were made using sputtered copper and bismuth films annealed in a sulphur atmosphere and thermal co- evaporation of copper sulphide and bismuth
The VIRMOS deep imaging survey: III. ESO/WFI deep U-band imaging of the 0226-04 deep field
In this paper we describe the U-band imaging of the F02 deep field, one of
the fields in the VIRMOS Deep Imaging Survey. The observations were done at the
ESO/MPG 2.2m telescope at La Silla (Chile) using the 8k x 8k Wide-Field Imager
(WFI). The field is centered at alpha(J2000)=02h 26m 00s and
delta(J2000)=-04deg 30' 00", the total covered area is 0.9 deg**2 and the
limiting magnitude (50% completeness) is U(AB) ~ 25.4 mag. Reduction steps,
including astrometry, photometry and catalogue extraction, are first discussed.
The achieved astrometric accuracy (RMS) is ~ 0.2" with reference to the I-band
catalog and ~ 0.07" internally (estimated from overlapping sources in different
exposures). The photometric accuracy including uncertainties from photometric
calibration, is < 0.1 mag. Various tests are then performed as a quality
assessment of the data. They include: (i) the color distribution of stars and
galaxies in the field, done together with the BVRI data available from the
VIMOS survey; (ii) the comparison with previous published results of U-band
magnitude-number counts of galaxies.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, accepted for publication on Astronomy and
Astrophysic
Polypharmacy, potentially serious clinically relevant drug-drug interactions, and inappropriate medicines in elderly people with type 2 diabetes and their impact on quality of life
The aim of the study is to investigate the patterns of polypharmacy, clinical-relevant drug-drug interactions (DDIs), and potentially inappropriate medicines (PIMs), and whether polypharmacy, potential serious clinically-relevant DDIs, or PIMs can be associated with low quality of life (QoL) index scores of older adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D). A cross-sectional study was conducted using data of 670 elderly T2D sub-cohort from a nationwide pharmacy-based intensive monitoring study of inception cohort of T2D in Portugal. 72.09% were found on polypharmacy (â„5 medicines). Participants on polypharmacy were mostly females (PÂ =Â .0115); more obese (PÂ =Â .0131); have more comorbid conditions (PÂ <Â .0001); more diabetes complications (PÂ <Â .0001); and use more of glucose lowering drugs (PÂ =Â .0326); insulin (PÂ <Â .0001); chronic medicines (PÂ <Â .0001); and have higher diabetes duration (PÂ =Â .0088) than those without polypharmacy. 10.59% of the participants were found to have potential serious clinically relevant DDIs. The most frequent drug-combinations were angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors with angiotensin-receptor blockers (ARBs), aspirin with Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), and clopidogrel with calcium channel blockers. PIMs are found in 36.11% of the participants. The most common PIMs were benzodiazepines, long-acting sulfonylureas, and iron overdose. The adjusted multivariate models show that Polypharmacy, PIMs, and potential serious clinically relevant DDIs were associated with lower QoL index scores (OR 1.80 95% CI 1.15-2.82), (OR 1.57 95% CI 1.07-2.28), and (OR 1.34 95% CI 0.73-2.48) respectively. The study shows that polypharmacy, potential serious clinical-relevant DDIs, and PIMs may correlate with risk of reduced health related QoL outcome of older adults with T2D.publishersversionpublishe
Studying the evolution of large-scale structure with the VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey
The VIMOS-VLT Deep Survey (VVDS) currently offers a unique combination of
depth, angular size and number of measured galaxies among surveys of the
distant Universe: ~ 11,000 spectra over 0.5 deg2 to I_{AB}=24 (VVDS-Deep),
35,000 spectra over ~ 7 deg2 to I_{AB}=22.5 (VVDS-Wide). The current ``First
Epoch'' data from VVDS-Deep already allow investigations of galaxy clustering
and its dependence on galaxy properties to be extended to redshifts ~1.2-1.5,
in addition to measuring accurately evolution in the properties of galaxies up
to z~4. This paper concentrates on the main results obtained so far on galaxy
clustering. Overall, L* galaxies at z~ 1.5 show a correlation length r_0=3.6\pm
0.7. As a consequence, the linear galaxy bias at fixed luminosity rises over
the same range from the value b~1 measured locally, to b=1.5 +/- 0.1. The
interplay of galaxy and structure evolution in producing this observation is
discussed in some detail. Galaxy clustering is found to depend on galaxy
luminosity also at z~ 1, but luminous galaxies at this redshift show a
significantly steeper small-scale correlation function than their z=0
counterparts. Finally, red galaxies remain more clustered than blue galaxies
out to similar redshifts, with a nearly constant relative bias among the two
classes, b_{rel}~1.4, despite the rather dramatic evolution of the
color-density relation over the same redshift range.Comment: 14 pages. Extended, combined version of two invited review papers
presented at: 1) XXVIth Astrophysics Moriond Meeting: "From Dark Halos to
Light", March 2006, proc. edited by L.Tresse, S. Maurogordato and J. Tran
Thanh Van (Editions Frontieres); 2) Vulcano Workshop 2006 "Frontier Objects
in Astrophysics and Particle Physics", May 2006, proc. edited by F.
Giovannelli & G. Mannocchi, Italian Physical Society (Editrice Compositori,
Bologna
A direct probe of cosmological power spectra of the peculiar velocity field and the gravitational lensing magnification from photometric redshift surveys
The cosmological peculiar velocity field (deviations from the pure Hubble
flow) of matter carries significant information on dark energy, dark matter and
the underlying theory of gravity on large scales. Peculiar motions of galaxies
introduce systematic deviations between the observed galaxy redshifts z and the
corresponding cosmological redshifts z_cos. A novel method for estimating the
angular power spectrum of the peculiar velocity field based on observations of
galaxy redshifts and apparent magnitudes m (or equivalently fluxes) is
presented. This method exploits the fact that a mean relation between z_cos and
m of galaxies can be derived from all galaxies in a redshift-magnitude survey.
Given a galaxy magnitude, it is shown that the z_cos(m) relation yields its
cosmological redshift with a 1-sigma error of sigma_z~0.3 for a survey like
Euclid (~10^9 galaxies at z<~2), and can be used to constrain the angular power
spectrum of z-z_cos(m) with a high signal-to-noise ratio. At large angular
separations corresponding to l<~15, we obtain significant constraints on the
power spectrum of the peculiar velocity field. At 15<~l<~60, magnitude shifts
in the z_cos(m) relation caused by gravitational lensing magnification
dominate, allowing us to probe the line-of-sight integral of the gravitational
potential. Effects related to the environmental dependence in the luminosity
function can easily be computed and their contamination removed from the
estimated power spectra. The amplitude of the combined velocity and lensing
power spectra at z~1 can be measured with <~5% accuracy.Comment: 22 pages, 3 figures; added a discussion of systematic errors,
accepted for publication in JCA
The VIMOS Integral Field Unit: data reduction methods and quality assessment
With new generation spectrographs integral field spectroscopy is becoming a
widely used observational technique. The Integral Field Unit of the VIsible
Multi-Object Spectrograph on the ESO-VLT allows to sample a field as large as
54" x 54" covered by 6400 fibers coupled with micro-lenses. We are presenting
here the methods of the data processing software developed to extract the
astrophysical signal of faint sources from the VIMOS IFU observations. We focus
on the treatment of the fiber-to-fiber relative transmission and the sky
subtraction, and the dedicated tasks we have built to address the peculiarities
and unprecedented complexity of the dataset. We review the automated process we
have developed under the VIPGI data organization and reduction environment
(Scodeggio et al. 2005), along with the quality control performed to validate
the process. The VIPGI-IFU data processing environment is available to the
scientific community to process VIMOS-IFU data since November 2003.Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures and 1 table. Accepted for publication in PAS
Large Structures and Galaxy Evolution in COSMOS at z < 1.1
We present the first identification of large-scale structures (LSS) at z in the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). The structures are identified
from adaptive smoothing of galaxy counts in the pseudo-3d space
(,z) using the COSMOS photometric redshift catalog. The
technique is tested on a simulation including galaxies distributed in model
clusters and a field galaxy population -- recovering structures on all scales
from 1 to 20\arcmin without {\it a priori} assumptions for the structure size
or density profile. Our procedure makes {\bf no} {\it a priori} selection on
galaxy spectral energy distribution (SED, for example the Red Sequence),
enabling an unbiased investigation of environmental effects on galaxy
evolution. The COSMOS photometric redshift catalog yields a sample of
galaxies with redshift accuracy, at z down to I mag. Using this sample of galaxies,
we identify 42 large-scale structures and clusters. abstract truncated for
astroph 25 line limit -- see preprintComment: 72 pages with 29 pages of figures, for cosmos apj suppl special issu
Sensitivity and representativeness of One-Health surveillance for diseases of zoonotic potential at health facilities relative to household visits in rural Guatemala
Most human and animal disease notification systems are unintegrated and passive, resulting in underreporting. Active surveillance can complement passive efforts, but because they are resource-intensive, their attributes must be evaluated. We assessed the sensitivity and representativeness of One-Health surveillance conducted at health facilities compared to health facilities plus monthly household visits in three rural communities of Guatemala. From September 2017 to November 2018, we screened humans for acute diarrheal, febrile and respiratory infectious syndromes and canines, swine, equines and bovines for syndromic events or deaths. We estimated the relative sensitivity as the incidence rate ratio of detecting an event in health facility surveillance compared to household surveillance from Poisson models. We used interaction terms between the surveillance method and sociodemographic factors or time trends to assess effect modification as a measure of relative representativeness. We used generalized additive models with smoothing splines to model incidence over time by surveillance method. We randomized 216 households to health facility surveillance and 198 to health facility surveillance plus monthly household visits. Health facility surveillance alone was less sensitive than when combined with household surveillance by 0.42 (95% CI: 0.34, 0.53), 0.56 (95% CI: 0.39, 0.79), 0.02 (95% CI: 0.00, 0.10), 0.28 (95% CI: 0.15, 0.50) and 0.22 (95% CI: 0.03, 0.92) times for human acute infections, human severe acute infections, and deaths in canines, swine and equines, respectively. Health facility surveillance alone underrepresented Spanish speakers (interaction p-value = 0.0003) and persons in higher economic assets (interaction p-values = 0.0008). The trend in incidence over time was different between the two study groups, with a larger decrease in the group with household surveillance (all interaction p-values <0.10). Surveillance at health facilities under ascertains syndromes in humans and animals which leads to underestimation of the burden of zoonotic disease. The magnitude of under ascertainment was differentially by sociodemographic factors, yielding an unrepresentative sample of health events. However, it is less time-intensive, thus might be sustained over time longer than household surveillance. The choice between methodologies should be evaluated against surveillance goals and available resources
The Build-Up of the Hubble Sequence in the COSMOS Field
We use ~8,600 >5e10 Msol COSMOS galaxies to study how the morphological mix
of massive ellipticals, bulge-dominated disks, intermediate-bulge disks,
bulge-less disks and irregular galaxies evolves from z=0.2 to z=1. The
morphological evolution depends strongly on mass. At M>3e11 Msol, no evolution
is detected in the morphological mix: ellipticals dominate since z=1, and the
Hubble sequence has quantitatively settled down by this epoch. At the 1e11 Msol
mass scale, little evolution is detected, which can be entirely explained with
major mergers. Most of the morphological evolution from z=1 to z=0.2 takes
place at masses 5e10 - 1e11 Msol, where: (i) The fraction of spirals
substantially drops and the contribution of early-types increases. This
increase is mostly produced by the growth of bulge-dominated disks, which vary
their contribution from ~10% at z=1 to >30% at z=0.2 (cf. the elliptical
fraction grows from ~15% to ~20%). Thus, at these masses, transformations from
late- to early-types result in disk-less elliptical morphologies with a
statistical frequency of only 30% - 40%. Otherwise, the processes which are
responsible for the transformations either retain or produce a non-negligible
disk component. (ii) The bulge-less disk galaxies, which contribute ~15% to the
intermediate-mass galaxy population at z=1, virtually disappear by z=0.2. The
merger rate since z=1 is too low to account for the disappearance of these
massive bulge-less disks, which most likely grow a bulge via secular evolution.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, submitted to ApJ
The VIMOS Public Extragalactic Redshift Survey (VIPERS). Exploring the dependence of the three-point correlation function on stellar mass and luminosity at 0.5<z<1.1
The three-point correlation function (3PCF) is a powerful probe to
investigate the clustering of matter in the Universe in a complementary way
with respect to lower-order statistics, providing additional information with
respect to the two-point correlation function and allowing us to shed light on
biasing, nonlinear processes, and deviations from Gaussian statistics. In this
paper, we analyse the first data release of the VIMOS Public Extragalactic
Redshift Survey (VIPERS), determining the dependence of the three-point
correlation function on luminosity and stellar mass at . We
exploit the VIPERS Public Data Release 1, consisting of more than 50,000
galaxies with B-band magnitudes in the range and stellar masses in the range
. We measure both the
connected 3PCF and the reduced 3PCF in redshift space, probing different
configurations and scales, in the range [Mpc/h]. We find a
significant dependence of the reduced 3PCF on scales and triangle shapes, with
stronger anisotropy at larger scales ( Mpc/h) and an almost flat trend
at smaller scales, Mpc/h. Massive and luminous galaxies present a
larger connected 3PCF, while the reduced 3PCF is remarkably insensitive to
magnitude and stellar masses in the range we explored. These trends, already
observed at low redshifts, are confirmed for the first time to be still valid
up to , providing support to the hierarchical scenario for which massive
and bright systems are expected to be more clustered. The possibility of using
the measured 3PCF to provide independent constraints on the linear galaxy bias
has also been explored, showing promising results in agreement with other
probes.Comment: 12 pages, 11 figures, 2 tables, accepted for publication in A&
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