Corrosion Behavior of Parylene-Metal-Parylene Thin Films in Saline

In this paper, we study the corrosion behavior of parylene-metal-parylene thin films using accelerated-lifetime soak tests. The samples under test are thin film resistors with a 200 nm layer of Au sandwiched by parylene-C on both sides, fabricated with parylene-metal skin technology. The samples are tested in hot saline both passively and actively, and different failure modes are observed using optical and electron-beam metrologies. Bubbles and delamination are first seen in the samples after 2 days of soaking under passive conditions, and followed by metal corrosion. While under active conditions, either bubbles or parylene breakdowns are observed depending on the thickness of parylene packaging. These results contribute to a better understanding of the failure mechanisms of parylene packaging in body fluids

The Nuclear Activity of the Galaxies in the Hickson Compact Groups

In order to investigate the nuclear activity of galaxies residing in compact groups of galaxies, we present results of our optical spectroscopic program made at Okayama Astrophysical Observatory. We have performed optical spectroscopy of 69 galaxies which belong to 31 Hickson Compact Groups (HCGs) of Galaxies. Among them, three galaxies have discordant redshifts. Further, spectral quality is too poor to classify other three galaxies. Therefore, we describe our results for the remaining 63 galaxies. Our main results are summarized below. (1) We have found in our sample; 28 AGN, 16 HII nuclei, and 19 normal galaxies which show no emission line. We used this HCG sample for statistical analyses. (2) Comparing the frequency distributions of activity types between the HCGs and the field galaxies whose data are taken from Ho, Filippenko, & Sargent (382 field galaxies), we find that the frequency of HII nuclei in the HCGs is significantly less than that in the field. However, this difference may be due to selection bias that our HCG sample contains more early-type galaxies than the field, because it is known that HII nuclei are rarer in early-type galaxies than in later ones. (3) Applying correction this morphological bias to the HCG sample, we find that there is no statistically significant difference in the frequency of occurrence of emission-line galaxies between the HCGs and the field. This implies that the dense galaxy environment in the HCGs does not affect triggering both the AGN activity and the nuclear starburst. We discuss some implications on the nuclear activity in the HCG galaxies.Comment: 33 pages (3 aasms4 LaTeX files), 5 figures (5 Postscript files: excluded Figure 1), Accepted for publication in The Astronomical Journa

Large-Eddy Simulation of a Gas Turbine Model Combustor

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/106433/1/AIAA2013-172.pd

A quantitative evaluation of metallic conduction in conjugated polymers

As the periodicity in crystalline materials creates the optimal condition for electronic delocalization, one might expect that in partially crystalline conjugated polymers delocalization is impeded by intergrain transport. However, for the best conducting polymers this presumption fails. Delocalization is obstructed by interchain rather than intergrain charge transfer and we propose a model of weakly coupled disordered chains to describe the physics near the metal-insulator transition. Our quantitative calculations match the outcome of recent broad-band optical experiments and provide a consistent explanation of metallic conduction in polymers.Comment: 4 pages incl. 3 figure

Ultrafast Thermal Modification of Strong Coupling in an Organic Microcavity

There is growing interest in using strongly coupled organic microcavities to tune molecular dynamics, including the electronic and vibrational properties of molecules. However, very little attention has been paid to the utility of cavity polaritons as sensors for out-of-equilibrium phenomena, including thermal excitations. Here, we demonstrate that non-resonant infrared excitation of an organic microcavity system induces a transient response in the visible spectral range near the cavity polariton resonances. We show how these optical response can be understood in terms of ultrafast heating of electrons in the metal cavity mirror, which modifies the effective refractive index and subsequently the strong coupling conditions. The temporal dynamics of the microcavity are strictly determined by carriers in the metal, including the cooling of electrons via electron-phonon coupling and excitation of propagating coherent acoustic modes in the lattice. We rule out multiphoton excitation processes and verify that no real polariton population exists despite their strong transient features. These results suggest the promise of cavity polaritons as sensitive probes of non-equilibrium phenomena

Limits on monopole fluxes from KFG experiment

The nucleon decay experiment at KGF at a depth of 2.3 Km is eminently suited for the search of Grand Unified theory (GUT) monopoles, whose velocities at the present epoch are predicted to be around 0.001C. At this depth the cosmic ray background is at a level 2/day in the detector of size 4m x 6m x 3.7m and one can look for monopoles traversing the detector in all directions, using three methods, i.e., (1) dE/dx (ionization); (2) time of flight and (3) catalysis of nucleon decay. The detector is composed of 34 layers of proportional counters arranged in horizontal planes one above the other in an orthogonal maxtrix. Each of the 1594 counters are instrumented to measure ionization in the gas (90% Argon + 10% Methane) as well as the time of arrival of particles

Wildbook: Crowdsourcing, computer vision, and data science for conservation

Photographs, taken by field scientists, tourists, automated cameras, and incidental photographers, are the most abundant source of data on wildlife today. Wildbook is an autonomous computational system that starts from massive collections of images and, by detecting various species of animals and identifying individuals, combined with sophisticated data management, turns them into high resolution information database, enabling scientific inquiry, conservation, and citizen science. We have built Wildbooks for whales (flukebook.org), sharks (whaleshark.org), two species of zebras (Grevy's and plains), and several others. In January 2016, Wildbook enabled the first ever full species (the endangered Grevy's zebra) census using photographs taken by ordinary citizens in Kenya. The resulting numbers are now the official species census used by IUCN Red List: http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/7950/0. In 2016, Wildbook partnered up with WWF to build Wildbook for Sea Turtles, Internet of Turtles (IoT), as well as systems for seals and lynx. Most recently, we have demonstrated that we can now use publicly available social media images to count and track wild animals. In this paper we present and discuss both the impact and challenges that the use of crowdsourced images can have on wildlife conservation.Comment: Presented at the Data For Good Exchange 201

Optical study on doped polyaniline composite films

Localization driven by disorder has a strong influence on the conducting property of conducting polymer. A class of authors hold the opinion that disorder in the material is homogeneous and conducting polymer is disordered metal close to Anderson-Mott Metal-Insulator transition, while others treat the disorder as inhomogeneous and have the conclusion that conducting polymer is a composite of ordered metallic regions and disordered insulating regions. The morphology of conducting polymers is an important factor that have influence on the type and extent of disorder. Different protonic acids used as dopants and moisture have affection on polymer chain arrangement and interchain interactions. A PANI-CSA film, two PANI-CSA/PANI-DBSA composite films with different dopants ratio, and one of the composite films with different moisture content are studied. Absolute reflectivity measurements are performed on the films. Optical conductivity and the real part of dielectric function are calculated by Kramers-Kronig(KK) relations. $\sigma_1(\omega)$ and $\epsilon_1(\omega)$ derivate from simple Drude model in low frequency range and tendencies of the three sample are different and non-monotonic. The Localization Modified Drude model(LMD) in the framework of Anderson-Mott theory can not give a good fit to the experimental data. By introducing a distribution of relaxation time into LMD, reasonable fits for all three samples are obtained. This result supports the inhomogeneous picture.Comment: 6 figures, 7 page

The Glass Transition and Liquid-Gas Spinodal Boundaries of Metastable Liquids

A liquid can exist under conditions of thermodynamic stability or metastability within boundaries defined by the liquid-gas spinodal and the glass transition line. The relationship between these boundaries has been investigated previously using computer simulations, the energy landscape formalism, and simplified model calculations. We calculate these stability boundaries semi-analytically for a model glass forming liquid, employing accurate liquid state theory and a first-principles approach to the glass transition. These boundaries intersect at a finite temperature, consistent with previous simulation-based studies.Comment: Minor text revisions. Fig.s 4, 5 update