Synthesis and characterization of spherical amorphous alumo-silicate nanoparticles using RF thermal plasma method

The RF thermal plasma synthesis route was used for the preparation of alumo-silicate spherical particles. Homogeneous solid mixtures of raw materials (Al2O3, SiO2 and KOH) were used as precursors. SiO2 powders with different particle sizes (6 μm and 40 μm) were taken for this synthesis. For the characterization of obtained materials, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) analysis, infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and thermogravimetric analysis (TG/DTA) were used. Nanosized amorphous ceramic particles were formed via two-step RF thermal plasma processing. It was demonstrated that the size of the SiO2 particles plays a significant role in the formation of the alumo-silicate nanoparticles

Nuclear-resonant electron scattering

We investigate nuclear-resonant electron scattering as occurring in the two-step process of nuclear excitation by electron capture (NEEC) followed by internal conversion. The nuclear excitation and decay are treated by a phenomenological collective model in which nuclear states and transition probabilities are described by experimental parameters. We present capture rates and resonant strengths for a number of heavy ion collision systems considering various scenarios for the resonant electron scattering process. The results show that for certain cases resonant electron scattering can have significantly larger resonance strengths than NEEC followed by the radiative decay of the nucleus. We discuss the impact of our findings on the possible experimental observation of NEEC.Comment: 24 pages, 2 plots, 5 table

Rural economic development in the post-agricultural era : policy recommendations

Present rural economies of developed countries are no more dominated by agriculture. However, in policies of rural economic development the position of farming remains very strong due to the persisiting pro - ductivist thinking. Consequently, the tools of such policies are strongly related to agriculture, despite its minor contribution to rural economies of developed countries. The aim of this article is to offer recommendations for more efficient policies of rural economic development which are not based only on agriculture. These policy re - commendations for European or national, regional and local authorities are key research findings of the project Non-agricultural and non-tourism economic industries in rural peripheries of the Visegrad countries funded by the International Visegrad Fund

Recovering a spinning inspiralling compact binary waveform immersed in LIGO-like noise with spinning templates

We investigate the recovery chances of highly spinning waveforms immersed in LIGO S5-like noise by performing a matched filtering with 10^6 randomly chosen spinning waveforms generated with the LAL package. While the masses of the compact binary are reasonably well recovered (slightly overestimated), the same does not hold true for the spins. We show the best fit matches both in the time-domain and the frequency-domain. These encompass some of the spinning characteristics of the signal, but far less than what would be required to identify the astrophysical parameters of the system. An improvement of the matching method is necessary, though may be difficult due to the noisy signal.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure + 4 figure panels; Proceedings of the Eight Edoardo Amaldi Conference on Gravitational Waves (Amaldi8), New York, 2009; to be published in J. Phys.: Conf. Series (JPCS

Theoretical study of the mechanism of dry oxidation of 4H-SiC

Possible defect structures, arising from the interaction of O-2 molecules with an ideal portion of the SiC/SiO2 interface, have been investigated systematically using density functional theory. Based on the calculated total energies and assuming thermal quasiequilibrium during oxidation, the most likely routes leading to complete oxidation have been determined. The defect structures produced along these routes will remain at the interface in significant concentration when stopping the oxidation process. The results obtained for their properties are well supported by experimental findings about the SiC/SiO2 interface. It is found that carbon-carbon bonds can explain most of the observed interface states but not the high density near the conduction band of 4H-SiC

Implicit Attentional Selection of Bound Visual Features

SummaryTraditionally, research on visual attention has been focused on the processes involved in conscious, explicit selection of task-relevant sensory input. Recently, however, it has been shown that attending to a specific feature of an object automatically increases neural sensitivity to this feature throughout the visual field. Here we show that directing attention to a specific color of an object results in attentional modulation of the processing of task-irrelevant and not consciously perceived motion signals that are spatiotemporally associated with this color throughout the visual field. Such implicit cross-feature spreading of attention takes place according to the veridical physical associations between the color and motion signals, even under special circumstances when they are perceptually misbound. These results imply that the units of implicit attentional selection are spatiotemporally colocalized feature clusters that are automatically bound throughout the visual field

TREATMENT OF SEWAGE CONTAINING OIL AND SLUDGE IN TRANSPORT INDUSTRY

This paper provides a brief review of main characteristics of sludges of the transport industry containing oil suspensions of inorganic, metallic and non-metallic origin and surface-active detergents. As a result of in-situ and laboratory investigations, a general treatment system and two new sets of equipment, a tangential settler and a special filter block are proposed for the treatment of that type of waste waters

Typical Borel measures on [0,1]d[0,1]d satisfy a multifractal formalism

In this article, we prove that in the Baire category sense, measures supported by the unit cube of $\R^d$ typically satisfy a multifractal formalism. To achieve this, we compute explicitly the multifractal spectrum of such typical measures $\mu$. This spectrum appears to be linear with slope 1, starting from 0 at exponent 0, ending at dimension $d$ at exponent $d$, and it indeed coincides with the Legendre transform of the $L^q$-spectrum associated with typical measures $\mu$.Comment: 17 pages. To appear in Nonlinearit