Dielectric mismatch and shallow donor impurities in GaN/HfO2 quantum wells

In this work we investigate electron-impurity binding energy in GaN/HfO$_2$ quantum wells. The calculation considers simultaneously all energy contributions caused by the dielectric mismatch: (i) image self-energy (i.e., interaction between electron and its image charge), (ii) the direct Coulomb interaction between the electron-impurity and (iii) the interactions among electron and impurity image charges. The theoretical model account for the solution of the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation and the results shows how the magnitude of the electron-impurity binding energy depends on the position of impurity in the well-barrier system. The role of the large dielectric constant in the barrier region is exposed with the comparison of the results for GaN/HfO$_2$ with those of a more typical GaN/AlN system, for two different confinement regimes: narrow and wide quantum wells.Comment: 6 Pages, 7 figure

Conditions for free magnetic monopoles in nanoscale square arrays of dipolar spin ice

We study a modified frustrated dipolar array recently proposed by M\"{o}ller and Moessner [Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{96}, 237202 (2006)], which is based on an array manufactured lithographically by Wang \emph{et al.} [Nature (London) \textbf{439}, 303 (2006)] and consists of introducing a height offset $h$ between islands (dipoles) pointing along the two different lattice directions. The ground-states and excitations are studied as a function of $h$. We have found, in qualitative agreement with the results of M\"{o}ller and Moessner, that the ground-state changes for $h>h_{1}$, where $h_{1}= 0.444a$ ($a$ is the lattice parameter or distance between islands). In addition, the excitations above the ground-state behave like magnetic poles but confined by a string, whose tension decreases as $h$ increases, in such a way that for $h\approx h_1$ its value is around 20 times smaller than that for $h=0$. The system exhibits an anisotropy in the sense that the string tension and magnetic charge depends significantly on the directions in which the monopoles are separated. In turn, the intensity of the magnetic charge abruptly changes when the monopoles are separated along the direction of the longest axis of the islands. Such a gap is attributed to the transition from the anti to the ferromagnetic ground-state when $h=h_1$.Comment: 6 pages, 7 figures. Published versio

Heterotrophy as a tool to overcome the long and costly autotrophic scale-up process for large scale production of microalgae

Industrial scale-up of microalgal cultures is often a protracted step prone to culture collapse and the occurrence of unwanted contaminants. To solve this problem, a two-stage scale-up process was developed - heterotrophically Chlorella vulgaris cells grown in fermenters (1st stage) were used to directly inoculate an outdoor industrial autotrophic microalgal production unit (2nd stage). A preliminary pilot-scale trial revealed that C. vulgaris cells grown heterotrophically adapted readily to outdoor autotrophic growth conditions (1-m3 photobioreactors) without any measurable difference as compared to conventional autotrophic inocula. Biomass concentration of 174.5 g L-1, the highest value ever reported for this microalga, was achieved in a 5-L fermenter during scale-up using the heterotrophic route. Inocula grown in 0.2- and 5-m3 industrial fermenters with mean productivity of 27.54 ± 5.07 and 31.86 ± 2.87 g L-1 d-1, respectively, were later used to seed several outdoor 100-m3 tubular photobioreactors. Overall, all photobioreactor cultures seeded from the heterotrophic route reached standard protein and chlorophyll contents of 52.18 ± 1.30% of DW and 23.98 ± 1.57 mg g-1 DW, respectively. In addition to providing reproducible, high-quality inocula, this two-stage approach led to a 5-fold and 12-fold decrease in scale-up time and occupancy area used for industrial scale-up, respectively.Agência financiadora project FERMALG 017608 Fundacao para a Ciencia e a Tecnologia (FCT) UID/Multi/04326/2019 project FERMALG (AVISO) 32/SI/2015info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Quantized fields and gravitational particle creation in f(R) expanding universes

The problem of cosmological particle creation for a spatially flat, homogeneous and isotropic Universes is discussed in the context of f(R) theories of gravity. Different from cosmological models based on general relativity theory, it is found that a conformal invariant metric does not forbid the creation of massless particles during the early stages (radiation era) of the Universe.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figure