Optical properties of TiBe2 in the range from 0.5 to 3.3 eV

The optical properties of polycrystalline TiBe2 have been determined by ellipsometry in the visible and infrared region. The most predominant features of the spectra are in excellent agreement with a calculation of the optical conductivity

Colorectal liver metastases: Surgery versus thermal ablation (COLLISION) - a phase III single-blind prospective randomized controlled trial

Background: Radiofrequency ablation (RFA) and microwave ablation (MWA) are widely accepted techniques to eliminate small unresectable colorectal liver metastases (CRLM). Although previous studies labelled thermal ablation inferior to surgical resection, the apparent selection bias when comparing patients with unresectable disease to surgical candidates, the superior safety profile, and the competitive overall survival results for the more recent reports mandate the setup of a randomized controlled trial. The objective of the COLLISION trial is to prove non-inferiority of thermal ablation compared to hepatic resection in patients with at least one resectable and ablatable CRLM and no extrahepatic disease. Methods: In this two-arm, single-blind multi-center phase-III clinical trial, six hundred and eighteen patients with at least one CRLM (≤3cm) will be included to undergo either surgical resection or thermal ablation of appointed target lesion(s) (≤3cm). Primary endpoint is OS (overall survival, intention-to-treat analysis). Main secondary endpoints are overall disease-free survival (DFS), time to progression (TTP), time to local progression (TTLP), primary and assisted technique efficacy (PTE, ATE), procedural morbidity and mortality, length of hospital stay, assessment of pain and quality of life (QoL), cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER) and quality-adjusted life years (QALY). Discussion: If thermal ablation proves to be non-inferior in treating lesions ≤3cm, a switch in treatment-method may lead to a reduction of the post-procedural morbidity and mortality, length of hospital stay and incremental costs without compromising oncological outcome for patients with CRLM. Trial registration:NCT03088150 , January 11th 2017

A 40 T pulsed field de Haas-van Alphen spectrometer

A pulsed field system is described, dedicated to de Haas-van Alphen experiments. Owing to the high field a good sensitivity is obtained, expressed in terms of a maximum allowable value for m*TD. This strongly relaxes the condition on the quality of single crystals for a Fermi surface study. Among the examples given the authors mention the observation of quantum oscillations from the neck orbit in the alloy Au1-xAgx for a concentration x of 15%. The system is online coupled to a minicomputer. The data are handled quickly and signal averaging is possible

De Haas-van Alphen study of the hexaborides of lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, and neodymium; first results

The de Haas-van Alphen effect has been observed in the hexaborides of La, Ce, Pr and Nd with the direction of the field parallel to [100]. The frequencies for the heavier rare-earth compounds are close to those for LaB6; large values for the mass compared to the ones in LaB6 and strong anisotropy of scattering has been observed

First observation of de Haas-van Alphen oscillations in titanium-beryllium (TiBe2): polycrystalline material

De Haas-van Alphen oscillations have been observed in polycrystalline TiBe2. A tentative interpretation is given in terms of a recent band-structure calculation