A Villager’s Map of the Provinces

What did a Russian peasant’s ‘mental map’ look like between 1917 and the consolidation of the Soviet order in 1934? To what extent does a specific province or oblast have a place on this map? Was ‘provincial Russia’ how peasants thought about the vast non-urban territory in transition? Provincial identity is an elusive category during any period – it was not the mental or physical space in which peasants lived. They resided in a village, were members of a parish encompassing several neighboring communities, and had contact with larger geographical units when they bought and sold goods, left for work in towns or cities, or were called up for military service. The fact that provincial identity is difficult to quantify does not make it insignificant, and, with the help of rural literature and oral histories, this paper will track provincial and regional ties among peasants for this period.abstrac

Exotic (anti)ferromagnetism in single crystals of Pr6Ni2Si3

The ternary intermetallic compound Pr6Ni2Si3, is a member of a structure series of compounds based on a triangular structure where the number of Pr atoms in the prism cross section can be systematically varied. Pr6Ni2Si3 contains two distinct Pr lattice sites which result in complex interactions between the magnetic ions. Extensive measurements of specific heat and magnetization on single crystal samples indicate that Pr6Ni2Si3 orders with both a ferromagnet and an antiferromagnet component, with ordering temperatures of 39.6 K and ~ 32 K, respectively. The ferromagnetic component // c-axis is accompanied by a large hysteresis, and the antiferromagnetic component,_|_ c-axis is accompanied by a spin-flop-type transition. More detailed measurements, of the vector magnetization, indicate that the ferromagnetic and the antiferromagnetic order appear independent of each other. These results not only clarify the behavior of Pr6Ni2Si3 itself, but also of the other members of the structure series, Pr5Ni2Si3 and Pr15Ni7Si10.Comment: 9 pages, 13 figures, submitted to PR

Chemical Bonding in Solids

This chapter discusses the various classes of hydride compounds, with a special focus on saline and metallic hydrides as well as oxyhydrides. It includes the following topics: thermodynamic stability, crystal chemistry, synthesis, and physical properties. The chapter also highlights recent progress in understanding hydride ion mobility in alkaline earth hydrides. It further deals with hydride compounds and in particular those containing alkali, alkaline earth, and transition and rare earth metals. The saline hydrides, that is, AH and AeH2 (with A=Li, Na, K, Rb, and Cs; Ae=Mg, Ca, Sr, and Ba) are proper ionic materials, in which hydrogen is present as hydride anions, H−. Saline hydrides show many similarities with their halide analogues, especially concerning crystal and electronic structures and, perhaps to a lesser extent, physical attributes such as brittleness, hardness, and optical properties