Developing Intentional Collections Storage

The Rochester Museum & Science Center (RMSC), located in Rochester, New York, is requesting $50,000 for a one-year period to develop a plan to better preserve the community's at-risk humanities collections through sustainable initiatives. The need for a storage area that provides safe, secure and appropriate environments for the museum's collections is the RMSC's most urgent preservation challenge. A Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections grant will allow us to work with expert consultants to create a plan that will transform the museum's basement collections storage and management spaces into a sustainable, space- and energy-efficient collections storage facility where the most environmentally sensitive humanities collections from problematic off-site storage areas can be relocated

Effect of pressure on the magnetic, transport, and thermal-transport properties of the electron-doped manganite CaMn1−x_{1-x}Sbx_{x}O3_{3}

We have demonstrated the effect of hydrostatic pressure on magnetic and transport properties, and thermal transport properties in electron-doped manganites CaMn$_{1-x}$Sb$_{x}$O$_{3}$. The substitution of Sb$^{5+}$ ion for Mn $^{4+}$site of the parent matrix causes one-electron doping with the chemical formula CaMn$^{4+}_{1-2x}$Mn$^{3+}_{x}$Sb$^{5+}_{x}$O$_{3}$ accompanied by a monotonous increase in unit cell volume as a function of $x$. Upon increasing the doping level of Sb, the magnitudes of both electrical resistivity and negative Seebeck coefficient are suppressed at high temperatures, indicating the electron doping. Anomalous diamagnetic behaviors at $x=0.05$ and 0.08 are clearly observed in field cooled dc magnetization. The effect of hydrostatic pressure on dc magnetization is in contrast to the chemical pressure effect due to Sb doping. The dynamical effect of ac magnetic susceptibility measurement points to the formation of the magnetically frustrated clusters such as FM clusters embedded in canted AFM matrix.Comment: 12 pages,11 figures, 3 table

Alternating Tree Automata with Qualitative Semantics

We study alternating automata with qualitative semantics over infinite binary trees: Alternation means that two opposing players construct a decoration of the input tree called a run, and the qualitative semantics says that a run of the automaton is accepting if almost all branches of the run are accepting. In this article, we prove a positive and a negative result for the emptiness problem of alternating automata with qualitative semantics. The positive result is the decidability of the emptiness problem for the case of Büchi acceptance condition. An interesting aspect of our approach is that we do not extend the classical solution for solving the emptiness problem of alternating automata, which first constructs an equivalent non-deterministic automaton. Instead, we directly construct an emptiness game making use of imperfect information. The negative result is the undecidability of the emptiness problem for the case of co-Büchi acceptance condition. This result has two direct consequences: The undecidability of monadic second-order logic extended with the qualitative path-measure quantifier and the undecidability of the emptiness problem for alternating tree automata with non-zero semantics, a recently introduced probabilistic model of alternating tree automata

Laser Fabrication of Polymer Ferroelectric Nanostructures for Nonvolatile Organic Memory Devices

8 pags.; 5 figs.© 2015 American Chemical Society. Polymer ferroelectric laser-induced periodic surface structures (LIPSS) have been prepared on ferroelectric thin films of a poly(vinylidene fluoride-trifluoroethylene) copolymer. Although this copolymer does not absorb light at the laser wavelength, LIPSS on the copolymer can be obtained by forming a bilayer with other light-absorbing polymers. The ferroelectric nature of the structured bilayer was proven by piezoresponse force microscopy measurements. Ferroelectric hysteresis was found on both the bilayer and the laser-structured bilayer. We show that it is possible to write ferroelectric information at the nanoscale. The laser-structured ferroelectric bilayer showed an increase in the information storage density of an order of magnitude, in comparison to the original bilayer.The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), through Contract Nos. MAT 2011-23455, MAT 2012- 33517, and CTQ 2013-43086-P. D.E.M. thanks CSIC for the tenure of JAE-Pre fellowship and Fondo Social Europeo (FSE) for cofinancing the JAE Program. A.R.R. and E.R. thank MINECO for the tenure of a FPI contract (BES-2013-062620) and a Ramón y Cajal contract (No. RYC-2011-08069), respectively.Peer Reviewe

Extracting Block Copolymer Dynamics from GISAXS

4th. International symposium on DSA.(2018)4th. International symposium on DSA. 11-13. November, 2F Pearl Room, Sapporo Park Hotel. Japan (2018) .-http://dsasymp.org/program.htm

Near infra-red light detection enhancement of plasmonic photodetectors

Nowadays numerous are the applications interested in exploiting near infrared light detection like LiDAR (at 850 - 950 nm wavelengths), NIR spectroscopy, quantum computation, and the detection of light from NIR emitting scintillators. Silicon based single photon avalanche diodes (SPAD) could be a valid device achieving high detection efficiency and high timing resolution. Moreover, they can provide single photon sensitivity in large areas if arranged in extended arrays named Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPM). Nevertheless, the Photon Detection Efficiency (PDE) of standard SiPMs in the NIR range is strongly limited by the relatively low Si absorption coefficient, leading to an absorption depth much larger than the typical active thickness of Si SPAD, i.e. 18 μm at 850 nm compared to some few μm’s. Hence, the performance of Si based detectors in NIR range is still inadequate for almost all the cited applications. A potential solution to overcome the limited Si absorption coefficient is to couple these photodetectors with a structure supporting highly confined light such as plasmonic oscillations, thus increasing the absorption. In recent years, the development in nanophotonic demonstrated that the interphase between metallic nanostructured and dielectric surface can support Surface Plasmon Polaritons (SPP) i.e. electrons collective oscillation highly confined along the thickness of the device. Some of these interesting nanostructured are: i) 1- and 2-dimensional gratings; ii) bullseye structures; iii) nano-pillars and nano-holes arrays. Among those, 1D and 2D metallic nanograting are the most promising structures considering their feasibility and possible integration with Si based photodetector and SiPM technologies. In this contribution, we investigated the integration of a bidimensional metallic plasmonic nanograting structure on state of art photodetectors (PDs). For ease of production and characterization, the test devices consisted of conventional Silicon photodiodes instead of a proper SPAD. The PDs have been produced at the facility of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy) using a custom CMOS-like microfabrication process similar the one used for FBK-SiPM technology. The previous described metallic nanograting is directly fabricated on a PDs by i) Electron Beam Lithography (EBL), ii) silver deposition, and iii) lift-off. Afterwards, the quantum efficiency (QE) of the produced samples have been measured in (450-1100) nm range. The first results are promising with an enhancement of about 45% at 950 nm with respect to the reference PD without any plasmonic nanostructured on top

STM induced hydrogen desorption via a hole resonance

We report STM-induced desorption of H from Si(100)-H(2$\times1$) at negative sample bias. The desorption rate exhibits a power-law dependence on current and a maximum desorption rate at -7 V. The desorption is explained by vibrational heating of H due to inelastic scattering of tunneling holes with the Si-H 5$\sigma$ hole resonance. The dependence of desorption rate on current and bias is analyzed using a novel approach for calculating inelastic scattering, which includes the effect of the electric field between tip and sample. We show that the maximum desorption rate at -7 V is due to a maximum fraction of inelastically scattered electrons at the onset of the field emission regime.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figures. To appear in Phys. Rev. Let

In situ real-time characterization of block copolymer self-assembly processes by GISAXS

E-MRS Spring Meeting and Exhibit will be held in the Convention Centre of Strasbourg (France), from June 18 to 22 (2018). .--https://www.european-mrs.com/block-copolymer-self-assembly-fundamentals-and-applications-emr

An evaluation of Cochrane Crowd found that crowdsourcing produced accurate results in identifying randomised trials

BACKGROUND: Filtering the deluge of new research to facilitate evidence synthesis has proven to be unmanageable using current paradigms of search and retrieval. Crowdsourcing, a way of harnessing the collective effort of a 'crowd' of people, has the potential to support evidence synthesis by addressing this information overload created by the exponential growth in primary research outputs. Cochrane Crowd, Cochrane's citizen science platform, offers a range of tasks aimed at identifying studies related to healthcare. Accompanying each task are brief, interactive training modules and agreement algorithms that help ensure accurate collective decision-making. OUR OBJECTIVES WERE: (1) to evaluate the performance of Cochrane Crowd in terms of its accuracy, capacity and autonomy; and (2) to examine contributor engagement across three tasks aimed at identifying randomised trials. STUDY DESIGN: Crowd accuracy was evaluated by measuring the sensitivity and specificity of crowd screening decisions on a sample of titles and abstracts, compared with 'quasi gold-standard' decisions about the same records using the conventional methods of dual screening. Crowd capacity, in the form of output volume, was evaluated by measuring the number of records processed by the crowd, compared with baseline. Crowd autonomy, the capability of the crowd to produce accurate collectively-derived decisions without the need for expert resolution, was measured by the proportion of records that needed resolving by an expert. RESULTS: The Cochrane Crowd community currently has 18,897 contributors from 163 countries. Collectively, the Crowd has processed 1,021,227 records, helping to identify 178,437 reports of randomised trials (RCTs) for Cochrane's Central Register of Controlled Trials. The sensitivity for each task was 99.1% for the randomised controlled trial identification task (RCT ID), 99.7% for the randomised controlled trial identification task of trial from ClinicalTrials.gov (CT ID) and 97.7% for identification of randomised controlled trials from the International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP ID). The specificity for each task was 99% for RCT ID, 98.6% for CT ID and 99.1% for ICTRP ID. The capacity of the combined Crowd and machine learning workflow has increased five-fold in six years, compared with baseline. The proportion of records requiring expert resolution across the tasks ranged from 16.6% to 19.7%. CONCLUSION: Cochrane Crowd is sufficiently accurate and scalable to keep pace with the current rate of publication (and registration) of new primary studies. It has also proved to be a popular, efficient and accurate way for a large number of people to play an important voluntary role in health evidence production. Cochrane Crowd is now an established part of Cochrane's effort to manage the deluge of primary research being produced