Reversible Graphene decoupling by NaCl photo-dissociation

We describe the reversible intercalation of Na under graphene on Ir(111) by photo-dissociation of a previously adsorbed NaCl overlayer. After room temperature evaporation, NaCl adsorbs on top of graphene forming a bilayer. With a combination of electron diffraction and photoemission techniques we demonstrate that the NaCl overlayer dissociates upon a short exposure to an X-ray beam. As a result, chlorine desorbs while sodium intercalates under the graphene, inducing an electronic decoupling from the underlying metal. Low energy electron diffraction shows the disappearance of the moir\'e pattern when Na intercalates between graphene and iridium. Analysis of the Na 2p core-level by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy shows a chemical change from NaCl to metallic buried Na at the graphene/Ir interface. The intercalation-decoupling process leads to a n-doped graphene due to the charge transfer from the Na, as revealed by constant energy angle resolved X-ray photoemission maps. Moreover, the process is reversible by a mild annealing of the samples without damaging the graphene

Extending OmpSs for OpenCL kernel co-execution in heterogeneous systems

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes,creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Heterogeneous systems have a very high potential performance but present difficulties in their programming. OmpSs is a well known framework for task based parallel applications, which is an interesting tool to simplify the programming of these systems. However, it does not support the co-execution of a single OpenCL kernel instance on several compute devices. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents an extension of the OmpSs framework that solves two main objectives: the automatic division of datasets among several devices and the management of their memory address spaces. To adapt to different kinds of applications, the data division can be performed by the novel HGuided load balancing algorithm or by the well known Static and Dynamic. All this is accomplished with negligible impact on the programming. Experimental results reveal that there is always one load balancing algorithm that improves the performance and energy consumption of the system.This work has been supported by the University of Cantabria with grant CVE-2014-18166, the Generalitat de Catalunya under grant 2014-SGR-1051, the Spanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness under contracts TIN2016- 76635-C2-2-R (AEI/FEDER, UE) and TIN2015-65316-P. The Spanish Government through the Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-0493). The European Research Council under grant agreement No 321253 European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme [FP7/2007-2013] and Horizon 2020 under the Mont-Blanc Projects, grant agreement n 288777, 610402 and 671697 and the European HiPEAC Network.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Temperature dependence of antiferromagnetic susceptibility in ferritin

We show that antiferromagnetic susceptibility in ferritin increases with temperature between 4.2 K and 180 K (i. e. below the N\'{e}el temperature) when taken as the derivative of the magnetization at high fields ($30\times10^4$ Oe). This behavior contrasts with the decrease in temperature previously found, where the susceptibility was determined at lower fields ($5\times10^4$ Oe). At high fields (up to $50 \times10^4$ Oe) the temperature dependence of the antiferromagnetic susceptibility in ferritin nanoparticles approaches the normal behavior of bulk antiferromagnets and nanoparticles considering superantiferromagnetism, this latter leading to a better agreement at high field and low temperature. The contrast with the previous results is due to the insufficient field range used ($< 5 \times10^4$ Oe), not enough to saturate the ferritin uncompensated moment.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, accepted in Phys. Rev.

Architectural support for task dependence management with flexible software scheduling

The growing complexity of multi-core architectures has motivated a wide range of software mechanisms to improve the orchestration of parallel executions. Task parallelism has become a very attractive approach thanks to its programmability, portability and potential for optimizations. However, with the expected increase in core counts, finer-grained tasking will be required to exploit the available parallelism, which will increase the overheads introduced by the runtime system. This work presents Task Dependence Manager (TDM), a hardware/software co-designed mechanism to mitigate runtime system overheads. TDM introduces a hardware unit, denoted Dependence Management Unit (DMU), and minimal ISA extensions that allow the runtime system to offload costly dependence tracking operations to the DMU and to still perform task scheduling in software. With lower hardware cost, TDM outperforms hardware-based solutions and enhances the flexibility, adaptability and composability of the system. Results show that TDM improves performance by 12.3% and reduces EDP by 20.4% on average with respect to a software runtime system. Compared to a runtime system fully implemented in hardware, TDM achieves an average speedup of 4.2% with 7.3x less area requirements and significant EDP reductions. In addition, five different software schedulers are evaluated with TDM, illustrating its flexibility and performance gains.This work has been supported by the RoMoL ERC Advanced Grant (GA 321253), by the European HiPEAC Network of Excellence, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (contracts TIN2015-65316-P, TIN2016-76635-C2-2-R and TIN2016-81840-REDT), by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272), and by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 671697 and No. 671610. M. Moretó has been partially supported by the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness under Juan de la Cierva postdoctoral fellowship number JCI-2012-15047.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Odonata of Argentina: state of knowledge and updated checklist

An updated checklist of the 282 species of Odonata known to occur in Argentina is presented along with distributional information by province and ecoregion. Ten new records for the country and 87 new provincial records are provided. At present, 17 species of Odonata are considered endemic to Argentina, and distribution maps for each of them are provided. Information on larvae and conservation status according to the IUCN Red List of Threatened species is also provided; there are still 98 larvae unknown and 169 species unassessed.Fil: Lozano, Federico. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda; ArgentinaFil: del Palacio, Alejandro. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentina. Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda; ArgentinaFil: Ramos, L.. Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda; ArgentinaFil: Muzon, Javier. Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas; Argentin

Preparation and characterization of non-supported microfiltration membranes from aluminosilicates

In the present work non-supported microfiltration ceramic membranes have been made from different aluminosilicate paste formulations. The cast green dopes were sintered at temperatures between 1100 and 1400°C. The membrane characterisation was made by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), mercury porosimetry, gas and water permeabilities and microorganisms rejection. The results indicate that an appropriate election of the size of the particles in the paste and of the final sintering temperature allows to obtain membranes with different mechanical and structural properties, with mean pore sizes within the range from 0.1 to 1 μm, that make them suitable for microfiltration.Fil: Almandoz, M.C.. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Fisico Matematicas y Naturales. Departamento de Fisica. Laboratorio de Ciencias de Superficies y Medios Porosos; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis; ArgentinaFil: Marchese, Jose. Universidad de Valladolid; España. Universidad Nacional de San Luis. Facultad de Ciencias Fisico Matematicas y Naturales. Departamento de Fisica. Laboratorio de Ciencias de Superficies y Medios Porosos; Argentina. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - San Luis; ArgentinaFil: Prádanos, P.. Universidad de Valladolid; EspañaFil: Palacio, L.. Universidad de Valladolid; EspañaFil: Hernández, A.. Universidad de Valladolid; Españ

Kv2.1 channels play opposing roles in regulating membrane potential, Ca2+ channel function, and myogenic tone in arterial smooth muscle.

The accepted role of the protein Kv2.1 in arterial smooth muscle cells is to form K+ channels in the sarcolemma. Opening of Kv2.1 channels causes membrane hyperpolarization, which decreases the activity of L-type CaV1.2 channels, lowering intracellular Ca2+ ([Ca2+]i) and causing smooth muscle relaxation. A limitation of this model is that it is based exclusively on data from male arterial myocytes. Here, we used a combination of electrophysiology as well as imaging approaches to investigate the role of Kv2.1 channels in male and female arterial myocytes. We confirmed that Kv2.1 plays a canonical conductive role but found it also has a structural role in arterial myocytes to enhance clustering of CaV1.2 channels. Less than 1% of Kv2.1 channels are conductive and induce membrane hyperpolarization. Paradoxically, by enhancing the structural clustering and probability of CaV1.2-CaV1.2 interactions within these clusters, Kv2.1 increases Ca2+ influx. These functional impacts of Kv2.1 depend on its level of expression, which varies with sex. In female myocytes, where expression of Kv2.1 protein is higher than in male myocytes, Kv2.1 has conductive and structural roles. Female myocytes have larger CaV1.2 clusters, larger [Ca2+]i, and larger myogenic tone than male myocytes. In contrast, in male myocytes, Kv2.1 channels regulate membrane potential but not CaV1.2 channel clustering. We propose a model in which Kv2.1 function varies with sex: in males, Kv2.1 channels control membrane potential but, in female myocytes, Kv2.1 plays dual electrical and CaV1.2 clustering roles. This contributes to sex-specific regulation of excitability, [Ca2+]i, and myogenic tone in arterial myocytes