The effect of manganese oxide on the sinterability of hydroxyapatite

The sinterability of manganese oxide (MnO2) doped hydroxyapatite (HA) ranging from 0.05 to 1 wt% was investigated. Green samples were prepared and sintered in air at temperatures ranging from 1000 to 1400 °C. Sintered bodies were characterized to determine the phase stability, grain size, bulk density, hardness, fracture toughness and Young's modulus. XRD analysis revealed that the HA phase stability was not disrupted throughout the sintering regime employed. In general, samples containing less than 0.5 wt% MnO2 and when sintered at lower temperatures exhibited higher mechanical properties than the undoped HA. The study revealed that all the MnO2-doped HA achieved >99% relative density when sintered at 1100–1250 °C as compared to the undoped HA which could only attained highest value of 98.9% at 1150 °C. The addition of 0.05 wt% MnO2 was found to be most beneficial as the samples exhibited the highest hardness of 7.58 GPa and fracture toughness of 1.65 MPam1/2 as compared to 5.72 GPa and 1.22 MPam1/2 for the undoped HA when sintered at 1000 °C. Additionally, it was found that the MnO2-doped samples attained E values above 110 GPa when sintered at temperature as low as 1000 °C if compared to 1050 °C for the undoped HA

Spin Susceptibility of a 2D Electron System in GaAs towards the Weak Interaction Region

We determine the spin susceptibility $\chi$ in the weak interaction regime of a tunable, high quality, two-dimensional electron system in a GaAs/AlGaAs heterostructure. The band structure effects, modifying mass and g-factor, are carefully taken into accounts since they become appreciable for the large electron densities of the weak interaction regime. When properly normalized, $\chi$ decreases monotonically from 3 to 1.1 with increasing density over our experimental range from 0.1 to $4\times10^{11} cm^{-2}$. In the high density limit, $\chi$ tends correctly towards $\chi\to 1$ and compare well with recent theory.Comment: Submitted to Physical Review

Improved drive current in RF vertical MOSFETS using hydrogen anneal

This letter reports a study on the effect of a hydrogen anneal after silicon pillar etch of surround-gate vertical MOSFETs intended for RF applications. A hydrogen anneal at 800 ?C is shown to give a 30% improvement in the drive current of 120-nm n-channel transistors compared with transistors without the hydrogen anneal. The value of drive current achieved is 250 ?A/?m, which is a record for thick pillar vertical MOSFETs. This improved performance is obtained even though a sacrificial oxidation was performed prior to the hydrogen anneal to smooth the pillar sidewall. The values of subthreshold slope and DIBL are 79 mV/decade and 45 mV/V, respectively, which are significantly better than most values reported in the literature for comparable devices. The H2 anneal is also shown to decrease the OFF-state leakage current by a factor of three

Ultra-high energy neutrino scattering

Estimates are made of the ultra-high energy neutrino cross sections based on an extrapolation to very small Bjorken x of the logarithmic Froissart dependence in x shown previously to provide an excellent fit to the measured proton structure function F_2^p(x,Q^2) over a broad range of the virtuality Q^2. Expressions are obtained for both the neutral current and the charged current cross sections. Comparison with an extrapolation based on perturbative QCD shows good agreement for energies where both fit data, but our rates are as much as a factor of 10 smaller for neutrino energies above 10^9 GeV, with important implications for experiments searching for extra-galactic neutrinos.Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, 1 table; Title, abstract and text changed, conclusions unchanged. Version accepted for publication in Physical Review