Modelling and experimental studies of alternative heat treatments in Steel 92 to optimise long term stress rupture properties

The desire for power plant to give increased generating efficiency and decreased CO2 emission has led to considerable effort over the last 10-15 years, to develop ferritic-martensitic steels which can be used for steam temperatures up to about 650°C. Examples are the addition of boron and increasing chromium content to 10-12 wt-%. However, high chromium levels have led to problems with long term precipitate stability. One approach which has not been widely explored, is the use of novel heat treatments to optimise the preservice microstructure to give the best long term creep rupture strength. Increased austenitising temperatures and lower tempering temperatures have been examined in Steel 92 (9Cr-0·5Mo-2W) and have produced significant improvements in creep rupture strength at temperatures up to 650°C compared with material given a conventional heat treatment. This has been achieved without any loss in ductility compared with conventional heat treatments. Test data for durations in excess of 40 000 h are presented. Modelling of microstructure evolution based on Monte Carlo simulations has shown important differences especially in the stability of grain boundary M23C6 and intragranular MX particles, between material with conventional and modified heat treatments. The model predictions are in good agreement with metallographic observations made on material before and after stress rupture testing. Continuum creep damage mechanics modelling based on the microstructural evolution has also been applied to predict creep life of Steel 92 and satisfactory agreement with creep rupture tests has been obtained

III-V 4D Transistors

We fabricated for the first time vertically and laterally integrated III-V 4D transistors. III-V gate-all-around (GAA) nanowire MOSFETs with $3×4$ arrays show high drive current of $1.35mA/ \mu m$ and high transconductance of $0.85mS/ \mu m$. The vertical stacking of the III-V nanowires have provided an elegant solution to the drivability bottleneck of nanowire devices and is promising for future low-power logic and RF application.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

A 27cal ka biomarker-based record of ecosystem changes from lacustrine sediments of the Chihuahua Desert of Mexico

Hydroclimate variation of the northwest Mexico during the late Pleistocene and Holocene is an active area of debate, with uncertainty in the nature and sources of precipitation. Previous research has inferred the influences of winter storms, summer monsoonal rain and autumn tropical cyclones. The impacts on regional and local ecosystems, however, are not well constrained. Here, we investigate the response of lacustrine and terrestrial habitats of the Santiaguillo Basin in the Chihuahua Desert (Mexico) to hydrological changes occurring since the late last glacial. Biomarkers from the sediments reflect variable input of organic matter (OM) from algal and bacterial biomass, aquatic microfauna and surrounding vegetation, revealing distinct stages of ecosystem adaption over the last 27 cal ka. Based on previously published and new data, we show that a perennial productive lake was present during the late glacial and it persisted until 17.5 cal ka BP. Coinciding with Heinrich event 1, OM supply from deteriorating wetland soils may have been caused by early dry conditions. Further phases of increasing aridity and a shrinking water body drove changing OM quality and biomarker composition during the early and mid-Holocene. A pronounced shift in biomarker distributions at 4 cal ka BP suggests that the supply of plant litter from resinous trees and grasses increased, likely reflecting the establishment of modern vegetation. Our results illustrate the potential of biomarker applications in the area, adding to the evidence of hydroclimate variability and enabling reconstructions of local ecosystem dynamics

Coherent and squeezed states in black-hole evaporation

In earlier Letters, we adopted a complex approach to quantum processes in the formation and evaporation of black holes. Taking Feynman's $+i\epsilon$ prescription, rather than than one of the more usual approaches, we calculated the quantum amplitude (not just the probability density) for final weak-field configurations following gravitational collapse to a black hole with subsequent evaporation. What we have done is to find quantum amplitudes relating to a pure state at late times following black-hole matter collapse. Such pure states are then shown to be susceptible to a description in terms of coherent and squeezed states - in practice, this description is not very different from that for the well-known highly-squeezed final state of the relic radiation background in inflationary cosmology. The simplest such collapse model involves Einstein gravity with a massless scalar field. The Feynman approach involves making the boundary-value problem for gravity and a massless scalar field well-posed. To define this, let T be the proper-time separation, measured at spatial infinity, between two space-like hypersurfaces on which initial (collapse) and final (evaporation) data are posed. Then, in this approach, one rotates T by a complex phase exp(-i\delta) into the lower half-plane. In an adiabatic approximation, the resulting quantum amplitude may be expressed in terms of generalised coherent states of the quantum oscillator, and a physical interpretation is given. A squeezed-state representation, as above, then follows

Unitary designs and codes

A unitary design is a collection of unitary matrices that approximate the entire unitary group, much like a spherical design approximates the entire unit sphere. In this paper, we use irreducible representations of the unitary group to find a general lower bound on the size of a unitary t-design in U(d), for any d and t. We also introduce the notion of a unitary code - a subset of U(d) in which the trace inner product of any pair of matrices is restricted to only a small number of distinct values - and give an upper bound for the size of a code of degree s in U(d) for any d and s. These bounds can be strengthened when the particular inner product values that occur in the code or design are known. Finally, we describe some constructions of designs: we give an upper bound on the size of the smallest weighted unitary t-design in U(d), and we catalogue some t-designs that arise from finite groups.Comment: 25 pages, no figure

InGaAs 3D MOSFETs with Drastically Different Shapes Formed by Anisotropic Wet Etching

In this work, we report on a 3D device fabrication technology achieved by applying a novel anisotropic wet etching method. By aligning channel structures along different crystal orientations, high performance 3D InGaAs devices with different channel shapes such as fins, nanowires and waves have been demonstrated. With further optimizing off-state leakage path by barrier engineering, a record high ION/IOFF over 10(8) and minimum I OFF~3pA/um have been obtained from InGaAs FinFET device. Scaling metrics for InGaAs GAA MOSFETs and FinFETs are systematically studied with Lch from 800 nm down to 50 nm and WFin/WNW from 100 nm down to 20 nm which shows an excellent immunity to short channel effects.Chemistry and Chemical Biolog

Bell-inequality violation with "thermal" radiation

The model of a quantum-optical device for a conditional preparation of entangled states from input mixed states is presented. It is demonstrated that even thermal or pseudo-thermal radiation can be entangled in such a way, that Bell-inequalities are violated

ICTV virus taxonomy profile : Sedoreoviridae 2022

Sedoreoviridae is a large family of icosahedral viruses that are usually regarded as non- enveloped with segmented (10–12 linear segments) dsRNA genomes of 18–26 kbp. Sedoreovirids have a broad host range, infecting mammals, birds, crustaceans, arthropods, algae and plants. Some of them have important pathogenic potential for humans (e.g. rotavirus A), livestock (e.g. bluetongue virus) and plants (e.g. rice dwarf virus).Instituto de BiotecnologíaFil: Matthijnssens, Jelle. University of Leuven; BélgicaFil: Attoui, Houssam. National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA); FranciaFil: Bányai, Krisztián. Veterinary Medical Research Institute; HungríaFil: Brussaard, Corina P. D. NIOZ Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research; Países BajosFil: Brussaard, Corina P. D. University of Utrecht; Países BajosFil: Danthi, Pranav. Indiana University; Estados UnidosFil: Del Vas, Mariana. Instituto Nacional de Tecnología Agropecuaria (INTA). Instituto de Agrobiotecnología y Biología Molecular (IABIMO); ArgentinaFil: Dermody, Terence S. University of Pittsburgh. School of Medicine; Estados UnidosFil: Duncan, Roy. Dalhousie University; CanadáFil: Fāng, Qín. Wuhan Institute of Virology; ChinaFil: Johne, Reimar. German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment; AlemaniaFil: Mertens, Peter P. C. University of Nottingham; Reino UnidoFil: Jaafar, Fauziah Mohd. Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire d’Alfort; FranciaFil: Patton, John T. Indiana University; Estados UnidosFil: Sasaya, Takahide. National Agriculture and Food Research Organization; JapónFil: Suzuki, Nobuhiro. Okayama University. JapónFil: Wei, Taiyun. Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University; Chin

Astrophysical structures from primordial quantum black holes

The characteristic sizes of astrophysical structures, up to the whole observed Universe, can be recovered, in principle, assuming that gravity is the overall interaction assembling systems starting from microscopic scales, whose order of magnitude is ruled by the Planck length and the related Compton wavelength. This result agrees with the absence of screening mechanisms for the gravitational interaction and could be connected to the presence of Yukawa corrections in the Newtonian potential which introduce typical interaction lengths. This result directly comes out from quantization of primordial black holes and then characteristic interaction lengths directly emerge from quantum field theory.Comment: 11 page

Non-Hermitian quantum mechanics in non-commutative space

We study non Hermitian quantum systems in noncommutative space as well as a \cal{PT}-symmetric deformation of this space. Specifically, a \mathcal{PT}-symmetric harmonic oscillator together with iC(x_1+x_2) interaction is discussed in this space and solutions are obtained. It is shown that in the \cal{PT} deformed noncommutative space the Hamiltonian may or may not possess real eigenvalues depending on the choice of the noncommutative parameters. However, it is shown that in standard noncommutative space, the iC(x_1+x_2) interaction generates only real eigenvalues despite the fact that the Hamiltonian is not \mathcal{PT}-symmetric. A complex interacting anisotropic oscillator system has also been discussed.Comment: 5 pages, revised versio