496 research outputs found
Caring for kids in the time of COVID-19
The proliferation of COVID-19 has disrupted tens of millions of children’s lives. Aside from the monotony of living indoors for extended periods, being quarantined can cause feelings of helplessness, anxiety, and fear in kids and parents. These feelings are familiar to chronically ill children whose treatment often necessitates years in and out of hospitals, but COVID-19 has made life harsher for these kids. While otherwise healthy children tend to have milder symptoms than adults, the same isn’t true for kids with compromised immune systems. Keeping these children safe requires hospitals to make adjustments that exacerbate their isolation from everything they are fighting so hard for— normalcy and connection.
If a hospitalized child shows symptoms of COVID-19, frontline staff must assume the child is positive for COVID-19 until proven otherwise. Therefore, all staff who enter the child’s room must wear PPEs, including a gown, gloves, mask, and face shield. These precautions can be frightening, even for kids who have spent months in the hospital for whom this new gear is an obvious sign that something has changed, and not for the better. Thankfully, child life specialists are still in the hospital and have mastered support for patients during COVID-19 testing while respecting hospital rules that prevent them from entering patient rooms to limit exposure and use of scarce PPE. The preparation, coping strategies, distraction, and verbal support before, during, and after the test, along with a selection of rewards for successfully completing the procedure, make something difficult a little bit easier.
Experience Framework
This article is associated with the Patient, Family & Community Engagement lens of The Beryl Institute Experience Framework. (http://bit.ly/ExperienceFramework) Access other PXJ articles related to this lens. Access other resources related to this lens
A policymakers' guide to economic forecasts
Forecasting ; Economic policy
Role of confined phonons in thin film superconductivity
We calculate the critical temperature and the superconducting energy
gaps of a thin film superconductor system, where is the
superconducting energy gap of the -th subband. Since the quantization of
both the electron energy and phonon spectrum arises due to dimensional
confinement in one direction, the effective electron-electron interaction
mediated by the quantized confined phonons is different from that mediated by
the bulk phonon, leading to the modification of in the thin film system.
We investigate the dependence of and on the film thickness
with this modified interaction.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure
Vortices and the mixed state of ultrathin Bi films
Current-voltage (I-V) characteristics of quench condensed, superconducting,
ultrathin Bi films in a magnetic field are reported. These show hysteresis for
all films, grown both with and without thin Ge underlayers. Films on Ge
underlayers, close to superconductor-insulator transition, show a peak in the
critical current, indicating a structural transformation of the vortex solid.
These underlayers, used to make the films more homogeneous, are found to be
more effective in pinning the vortices. The upper critical fields () of
these films are determined from the resistive transitions in perpendicular
magnetic field. The temperature dependence of the upper critical field is found
to differ significantly from Ginzburg-Landau theory, after modifications for
disorder.Comment: Submitted to LT23 Proceeding
Electronic structure of nanoscale iron oxide particles measured by scanning tunneling and photoelectron spectroscopies
We have investigated the electronic structure of nano-sized iron oxide by
scanning tunnelling microscopy (STM) and spectroscopy (STS) as well as by
photoelectron spectroscopy. Nano particles were produced by thermal treatment
of Ferritin molecules containing a self-assembled core of iron oxide. Depending
on the thermal treatment we were able to prepare different phases of iron oxide
nanoparticles resembling gamma-Fe2O3, alpha-Fe2O3, and a phase which apparently
contains both gamma-Fe2O3 and alpha-Fe2O3. Changes to the electronic structure
of these materials were studied under reducing conditions. We show that the
surface band gap of the electronic excitation spectrum can differ from that of
bulk material and is dominated by surface effects.Comment: REVTeX, 6 pages, 10 figures, submitted to PR
Scaling of the superfluid density in high-temperature superconductors
A scaling relation \rho_s \simeq 35\sigma_{dc}T_c has been observed in the
copper-oxide superconductors, where \rho_s is the strength of the
superconducting condensate, T_c is the critical temperature, and \sigma_{dc} is
the normal-state dc conductivity close to T_c. This scaling relation is
examined within the context of a clean and dirty-limit BCS superconductor.
These limits are well established for an isotropic BCS gap 2\Delta and a
normal-state scattering rate 1/\tau; in the clean limit 1/\tau \ll 2\Delta, and
in the dirty limit 1/\tau > 2\Delta. The dirty limit may also be defined
operationally as the regime where \rho_s varies with 1/\tau. It is shown that
the scaling relation \rho_s \propto \sigma_{dc}T_c is the hallmark of a BCS
system in the dirty-limit. While the gap in the copper-oxide superconductors is
considered to be d-wave with nodes and a gap maximum \Delta_0, if 1/\tau >
2\Delta_0 then the dirty-limit case is preserved. The scaling relation implies
that the copper-oxide superconductors are likely to be in the dirty limit, and
that as a result the energy scale associated with the formation of the
condensate is scaling linearly with T_c. The a-b planes and the c axis also
follow the same scaling relation. It is observed that the scaling behavior for
the dirty limit and the Josephson effect (assuming a BCS formalism) are
essentially identical, suggesting that in some regime these two effects may be
viewed as equivalent. This raises the possibility that electronic
inhomogeneities in the copper-oxygen planes may play an important role in the
nature of the superconductivity in the copper-oxide materials.Comment: 8 pages with 5 figures and 1 tabl
Parity-Affected Superconductivity in Ultrasmall Metallic Grains
We investigate the breakdown of BCS superconductivity in {\em ultra}\/small
metallic grains as a function of particle size (characterized by the mean
spacing between discrete electronic eigenstates), and the parity ( =
even/odd) of the number of electrons on the island. Assuming equally spaced
levels, we solve the parity-dependent BCS gap equation for the order parameter
. Both the critical level spacing and the
critical temperature at which are parity
dependent, and both are so much smaller in the odd than the even case that
these differences should be measurable in current experiments.Comment: 4 pages RevTeX, 1 encapsulated postscript figure, submitted to
Physical Review Letter
Extracting the electron--boson spectral function F() from infrared and photoemission data using inverse theory
We present a new method of extracting electron-boson spectral function
F() from infrared and photoemission data. This procedure is
based on inverse theory and will be shown to be superior to previous
techniques. Numerical implementation of the algorithm is presented in detail
and then used to accurately determine the doping and temperature dependence of
the spectral function in several families of high-T superconductors.
Principal limitations of extracting F() from experimental
data will be pointed out. We directly compare the IR and ARPES
F() and discuss the resonance structure in the spectra in
terms of existing theoretical models
Infrared Studies of the Onset of Conductivity in Ultra-Thin Pb Films
In this paper we report the first experimental measurement of the infrared
conductivity of ultra-thin quenched-condensed Pb films. For dc sheet
resistances such that the ac conductance increases with
frequency but is in disagreement with the predictions of weak localization. We
attribute this behavior to the effects of an inhomogeneous granular structure
of these films, which is manifested at the very small probing scale of infrared
measurements. Our data are consistent with predictions of two-dimensional
percolation theory.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review Letter
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