Status of ultrachemical analysis for semiconductors

Status of ultratrace chemical analyses of materials for semiconductors was studied. This study covered atomic absorption spectroscopy, emission spectroscopy, and activation analyses. It makes recommendations to improve sensitivity, reliability and versatility for ultratrace chemical analysis

The Relationship of the value of the Dollar, and the Prices of Gold and Oil: A Tale of Asset Risk

This paper investigates the relationship between the value of the dollar and the prices of two commodities, gold and oil. Granger causality is used on monthly data from January of 1970 through July of 2008. The empirical results show that the hypothesis that there is no causal relation between the value of the dollar and the prices of gold and oil is not supported by the evidence. There are causal relations between each of the prices, and there is a negative relation between the value of the dollar and the price of each of the commodities, as predicted by standard economic theory. Also consistent with the predictions of classical economic theory is that there is a positive statistical association between the prices of gold and oil. The implication is that gold and oil represent safe havens from fluctuations in the value of the dollar.Dollar, Gold, Oil, Exchange Rates, Commodity Prices, Granger Causality

Punishment and Inclusion: Race, Membership, and the Limits of American Liberalism

https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/facultypubnight/1026/thumbnail.jp

Consistent thermodynamic derivative estimates for tabular equations of state

Numerical simulations of compressible fluid flows require an equation of state (EOS) to relate the thermodynamic variables of density, internal energy, temperature, and pressure. A valid EOS must satisfy the thermodynamic conditions of consistency (derivation from a free energy) and stability (positive sound speed squared). When phase transitions are significant, the EOS is complicated and can only be specified in a table. For tabular EOS's such as SESAME from Los Alamos National Laboratory, the consistency and stability conditions take the form of a differential equation relating the derivatives of pressure and energy as functions of temperature and density, along with positivity constraints. Typical software interfaces to such tables based on polynomial or rational interpolants compute derivatives of pressure and energy and may enforce the stability conditions, but do not enforce the consistency condition and its derivatives. We describe a new type of table interface based on a constrained local least squares regression technique. It is applied to several SESAME EOS's showing how the consistency condition can be satisfied to round-off while computing first and second derivatives with demonstrated second-order convergence. An improvement of 14 orders of magnitude over conventional derivatives is demonstrated, although the new method is apparently two orders of magnitude slower, due to the fact that every evaluation requires solving an 11-dimensional nonlinear system.Comment: 29 pages, 9 figures, 16 references, submitted to Phys Rev

The Unlikely Duo That Shocked the Intellectual Property World and Why the Supreme Court Was the Chosen One to Restore Balance

The United States Congress passed the Leahy Smith America Invents Act in 2011 in an effort to streamline the patent system and reduce patent litigation, allowing the United States to continue to be competitive globally. The Act enabled the U.S. Patent Office to facilitate patent challenges through an administrative process called inter partes review, an adversarial proceeding before the newly established Patent Trial and Appeal Board that was designed to be a cheaper and more efficient alternative for post-grant patent review than litigation in front of the federal district courts. In the years that followed, the Patent Trail and Appeal Board has earned a reputation for being notoriously trigger-happy in its invalidation of patents. This reputation has encouraged patent holders to seek out ways to circumvent inter partes review in an effort to have their patents reviewed in front of the federal district courts, where they might stand a better chance. One such attempt was initiated by the global pharmaceutical company, Allergan, Inc., when it sold the rights to its Restasis eye drug to the Saint Regis Mohawk Tribe. The main components of the deal focused on a transfer of the Restasis ownership rights along with a yearly sum to the Tribe. In return, the Tribe licensed back the drug’s production rights to Allergan and agreed to assert a tribal sovereign immunity defense in response to any inter partes review challenge, which would force the dispute into the federal district court forum. The Allergan-Saint Regis deal threatened to have major impacts on the intellectual property world, the livelihoods of the federally recognized tribes, and the U.S. economy overall. The issues it presented involved an intersection of multiple types of law and begged a review of the patent review process, the state of the tribes today, and the scope of tribal sovereign immunity in today’s day and age. Whether tribal sovereign immunity could be applied to an administrative action in post-grant patent review evolved into a battle at multiple forums. When the dust settled, the Patent Trial and Review Board had issued a decision that tribal sovereign immunity was not applicable and invalidated the Restasis patent—a decision that was affirmed by the United States Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of the United States. This Comment discusses all of the angles in this case before advocating that the Supreme Court ultimately did not go far enough when it simply chose not to review the lower court’s decision. Instead, the Court should have used this opportunity to limit tribal sovereign immunity in a way that implies a waiver of sovereign immunity for economic activities that take place off of tribal lands. This solution would simultaneously help to promote overall systemic and economic efficiency, as well as allow the tribes a better opportunity to participate in today’s marketplaces—providing them with a more positive outlook for the future

Design, Fabrication, and Characterization of Multilayer Hyperbolic Metamaterials

Hyperbolic metamaterials (HMMs) show extreme anisotropy, acting as metals and dielectrics along orthogonal directions. They are designed using the effective medium theory (EMT) and can be fabricated using standard semiconductor processing techniques. Current techniques used to characterize the optical behavior of HMMs have a high complexity or are unable to robustly determine the complex permittivity tensor. We describe the details of a procedure to obtain a very low mean-squared-error (MSE) for extraction of permittivity from hyperbolic metamaterials using spectroscopic ellipsometry. We have verified our procedure by fabricating three different samples of various materials and fill factors designed to have a response in the visible spectrum with an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) region near the Helium-Neon (He-Ne) wavelength of 633 nm. The MSE obtained in each case has been less than 1.00. Our procedure eliminates the need for complicated ellipsometric measurements and modeling techniques, as well as the need for the addition of extra parts such as prisms. Therefore, the process can be easily adopted