Fine Structure in Energy Spectra of Ultrasmall Au Nanoparticles

We have studied tunneling into individual Au nanoparticles of estimated diameters 2-5 nm, at dilution refrigerator temperatures. The I-V curves indicate resonant tunneling via discrete energy levels of the particle. Unlike previously studied normal metal particles of Au and Al, in these samples we find that the lowest energy tunneling resonances are split into clusters of 2-10 subresonances. Such effects appear to be increasingly important in smaller grains, as might be expected from the larger characteristic energies.Comment: 1 pdf fil

Spectroscopy, Interactions and Level Splittings in Au Nanoparticles

We have measured the electronic energy spectra of nm-scale Au particles using a new tunneling spectroscopy configuration. The particle diameters ranged from 5nm to 9nm, and at low energies the spectrum is discrete, as expected by the electron-in-a-box model. The density of tunneling resonances increases rapidly with energy, and at higher energies the resonances overlap forming broad resonances. Near the Thouless energy, the broad resonances merge into a continuum. The tunneling resonances display Zeeman splitting in a magnetic field. Surprisingly, the g-factors (~0.3) of energy levels in Au nano-particles are much smaller than the g-factor (2.1) in bulk gold

Spin-Polarized Electron Transport through Nanometer-Scale Al Grains

We investigate spin-polarized electron tunnelling through ensembles of nanometer scale Al grains embedded between two Co-reservoirs at 4.2K, and observe tunnelling-magnetoresistance (TMR) and effects from spin-precession in the perpendicular applied magnetic field (the Hanle effect). The spin-coherence time ($T_2^\star$) measured using the Hanle effect is of order $ns$. The dephasing is attributed to electron spin-precession in local magnetic fields. Dephasing process does not destroy $TMR$, which is strongly asymmetric with bias voltage. The asymmetric TMR is explained by spin relaxation in Al grains and asymmetric electron dwell times.Comment: 4 pages 4 figure

Suppression of Ground-State Magnetization in Finite-Sized Systems Due to Off-Diagonal Interaction Fluctuations

We study a generic model of interacting fermions in a finite-sized disordered system. We show that the off-diagonal interaction matrix elements induce density of states fluctuations which generically favor a minimum spin ground state at large interaction amplitude, $U$. This effect competes with the exchange effect which favors large magnetization at large $U$, and it suppresses this exchange magnetization in a large parameter range. When off-diagonal fluctuations dominate, the model predicts a spin gap which is larger for odd-spin ground states as for even-spin, suggesting a simple experimental signature of this off-diagonal effect in Coulomb blockade transport measurements.Comment: Final, substantially modified version of the article. Accepted for publication in Physical Review Letter

The g-factors of discrete levels in nanoparticles

Spin-orbit scattering suppresses Zeeman splitting of individual energy levels in small metal particles. This suppression becomes significant when the spin-orbit scattering rate \tau_{so}^{-1} is comparable with the quantum level spacing \delta. The g-factor exhibits mesoscopic fluctuations; at small \delta\tau_{so} it is distributed according to the Maxwell distribution. At \delta\tau_{so}\to 0 the average g-factor levels off at a small value g\sim(l/L)^{1/2} given by the ratio of the electron mean free path l to the particle size L. On the contrary, in 2D quantum dots the g-factor is strongly enhanced by spin-orbit coupling.Comment: 4 page

Development of Grid e-Infrastructure in South-Eastern Europe

Over the period of 6 years and three phases, the SEE-GRID programme has established a strong regional human network in the area of distributed scientific computing and has set up a powerful regional Grid infrastructure. It attracted a number of user communities and applications from diverse fields from countries throughout the South-Eastern Europe. From the infrastructure point view, the first project phase has established a pilot Grid infrastructure with more than 20 resource centers in 11 countries. During the subsequent two phases of the project, the infrastructure has grown to currently 55 resource centers with more than 6600 CPUs and 750 TBs of disk storage, distributed in 16 participating countries. Inclusion of new resource centers to the existing infrastructure, as well as a support to new user communities, has demanded setup of regionally distributed core services, development of new monitoring and operational tools, and close collaboration of all partner institution in managing such a complex infrastructure. In this paper we give an overview of the development and current status of SEE-GRID regional infrastructure and describe its transition to the NGI-based Grid model in EGI, with the strong SEE regional collaboration.Comment: 22 pages, 12 figures, 4 table

Localization and Capacitance Fluctuations in Disordered Au Nano-junctions

Nano-junctions, containing atomic-scale gold contacts between strongly disordered leads, exhibit different transport properties at room temperature and at low temperature. At room temperature, the nano-junctions exhibit conductance quantization effects. At low temperatures, the contacts exhibit Coulomb-Blockade. We show that the differences between the room-temperature and low temperature properties arise from the localization of electronic states in the leads. The charging energy and capacitance of the nano-junctions exhibit strong fluctuations with applied magnetic field at low temperature, as predicted theoretically.Comment: 20 pages 8 figure

Antioxidant and antimicrobial edible films based on dextran containing polyphenols from yarrow extract

Current trends in food biotechnology are focused on replacing synthetic polymers used for food packages by the natural ones. Biopolymers are made by sustainable processes in a cheap way. Moreover, they are nontoxic and can serve as a good alternative to traditional (petroleum) food packaging, due to great film-formation properties in a form of edible films and coatings for food products. Various polysaccharides, proteins, and lipids have been intensively investigated as edible materials that could improve the food quality, freshness, and provide food safety. However, natural polymers usually lack of antioxidative and/or antimicrobial properties. Therefore, many synthetic and natural additives can be incorporated into edible films. Among them, extracts of medicinal plants are giving more attention due to their safeness and proved health benefits. The aim of this study was to obtain edible films based on dextran, with antioxidative and antimicrobial pro- perties. Dextran obtained in our lab was used for preparing edible film with sorbitol as a plasticizer, while pulverized waste biomass obtained from the processing of medicinal herb yarrow (Achillea millefolium) was used as a source of polyphenols. It has previously been shown 1 that dextran-based films had excellent mecha- nical and water vapor barrier properties. In this work, spray dried ethanol extract of Achillea millefolium dust (AME) was incorporated into dextran films in concentrations 2, 3, and 4% (w/v). The composite films were analyzed regarding antioxidative, antimicrobial, and mechanical properties. All films showed high antioxidative activity (90% reduction of DPPH radical). However, to obtain high antimicrobial activity (higher than 50%), 4% of AME was required. Composite films showed antimicrobial activity against three Gram-positive bacteria (Staphylococcus aureus, Listeria monocytogenes and Enterococcus faecalis and one Gram-negative bacterium (Pseudomonas aeruginosa). Incorporation of AME into dextran film showed positive effect on tensile strength and negative effect on elongation. Composite film with the best mechanical properties (tensile strength 3.5 MPa and elongation at break 37%) was the film containing 4% AME

Alignment-free method for functional annotation of amino acid substitutions: Application on epigenetic factors involved in hematologic malignancies

For the last couple of decades, there has been a significant growth in sequencing data, leading to an extraordinary increase in the number of gene variants. This places a challenge on the bioinformatics research community to develop and improve computational tools for functional annotation of new variants. Genes coding for epigenetic regulators have important roles in cancer pathogenesis and mutations in these genes show great potential as clinical biomarkers, especially in hematologic malignancies. Therefore, we developed a model that specifically focuses on these genes, with an assumption that it would outperform general models in predicting the functional effects of amino acid substitutions. EpiMut is a standalone software that implements a sequence based alignment-free method. We applied a two-step approach for generating sequence based features, relying on the biophysical and biochemical indices of amino acids and the Fourier Transform as a sequence transformation method. For each gene in the dataset, the machine learning algorithm–Naïve Bayes was used for building a model for prediction of the neutral or disease-related status of variants. EpiMut outperformed state-of-the-art tools used for comparison, PolyPhen-2, SIFT and SNAP2. Additionally, EpiMut showed the highest performance on the subset of variants positioned outside conserved functional domains of analysed proteins, which represents an important group of cancer-related variants. These results imply that EpiMut can be applied as a first choice tool in research of the impact of gene variants in epigenetic regulators, especially in the light of the biomarker role in hematologic malignancies. EpiMut is freely available at https://www.vin.bg.ac.rs/180/tools/epimut.php.EpiMut is freely available at [https://www.vin.bg.ac.rs/180/tools/epimut.php]