Detection of the onset of nanocrystallization by calorimetric and magnetic measurements

It is generally accepted that measurements of the magnetic properties are more sensitive than measurements of the enthalpy changes in the detection of the onset of crystallization of ferromagnetic phases emerging from a paramagnetic amorphous alloy. In this work, it is shown that the formation of a very fine nanocrystalline microstructure can make this assumption incorrect. Under some circumstances, the nanocrystallization onset temperature obtained from magnetic techniques is higher than the one obtained from enthalpy changes. The phenomenon is explained in terms of the superparamagnetic behavior of the uncoupled nanocrystals at the very early stages of nanocrystallizatio

Thermomagnetic detection of recrystallization in FeCoNbBCu nanocrystalline alloys

The recrystallization process in FeCoNbBCu nanocrystallinealloys is evidenced from thermomagnetic results as a significant decrease in magnetization at the second crystallization stage. The lowering in the volume fraction of α-FeCo crystals indicates that some of these crystals contribute to the boride phases formed. Electron microscopy images reveal that the final microstructure consists of large crystals (∼500 nm) of a fcc (FeCo)23B6(FeCo)23B6 phase and small crystals (∼20 nm) of bcc α-FeCo and of some boride phases as such (FeCo)2B

Magnetic permeability of ( Fe Co Ge ) 88 Zr 6 B 5 Cu 1 alloys: Thermal stability in a wide temperature range.

Temperature dependence, from room temperature up to 1000 K, of the initial permeability of Fe83−xCoxGe5Zr6B5Cu1 x=5 and 20 alloys at different stages of devitrification is reported. As nanocrystallization progresses, room temperature decreases but high temperature one increases, leading to an improvement of its thermal stability extended from room temperature up to 915 K, characterized by a temperature coefficient of permeability 0.1%/K 4000 and 0.04%/K 800 for 5 and 20 at. % Co containing alloys, respectively

CVD of CrO2: towards a lower temperature deposition process

We report on the synthesis of highly oriented a-axis CrO2 films onto (0001) sapphire by atmospheric pressure CVD from CrO3 precursor, at growth temperatures down to 330 degree Celsius, i.e. close to 70 degrees lower than in published data for the same chemical system. The films keep the high quality magnetic behaviour as those deposited at higher temperature, which can be looked as a promising result in view of their use with thermally sensitive materials, e.g. narrow band gap semiconductors.Comment: 13 pages, 4 figure

High-throughput screening methodology to identify alpha-synuclein aggregation inhibitors

An increasing number of neurodegenerative diseases are being found to be associated with the abnormal accumulation of aggregated proteins in the brain. In Parkinson’s disease, this process involves the aggregation of alpha-synuclein (a-syn) into intraneuronal inclusions. Thus, compounds that inhibit a-syn aggregation represent a promising therapeutic strategy as disease-modifying agents for neurodegeneration. The formation of a-syn amyloid aggregates can be reproduced in vitro by incubation of the recombinant protein. However, the in vitro aggregation of a-syn is exceedingly slow and highly irreproducible, therefore precluding fast high throughput anti-aggregation drug screening. Here, we present a simple and easy-to-implement in-plate method for screening large chemical libraries in the search for a-syn aggregation modulators. It allows us to monitor aggregation kinetics with high reproducibility, while being faster and requiring lower protein amounts than conventional aggregation assays. We illustrate how the approach enables the identification of strong aggregation inhibitors in a library of more than 14, 000 compounds

Gas proportional scintillation counter pulse-signature analysis using digital techniques

The use of short shaping time-constants (50 ns) followed by digital sampling of gas proportional scintillation counter pulses is investigated. Such short shaping time causes each pulse to closely resemble the scintillation light burst, allowing for an effective pulse-signature analysis. Pulse amplitude is obtained by numerical integration of the digital pulse samples. The shorter total pulse durations, lead to pulse-height distributions that are much less dependent on the total interaction rate occurring in the detector. Total interaction rates up to 12 k s-1 can be tolerated without significant degradation of the obtained pulse-height distribution. It was also verified that the maximum throughput achieved by the digital pulse-height analyser improves from 1 to 1.7 k s-1 when using the short shaping time-constants.http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6TJM-3VR1CVW-2F/1/2e9e952e1c3752048a2954b0dbbdec2

D3/D7 Quark-Gluon Plasma with Magnetically Induced Anisotropy

We study the effects of the temperature and of a magnetic field in the setup of an intersection of D3/D7 branes, where a large number of D7 branes is smeared in the transverse directions to allow for a perturbative solution in a backreaction parameter. The magnetic field sources an anisotropy in the plasma, and we investigate its physical consequences for the thermodynamics and energy loss of particles probing the system. In particular we comment on the stress-energy tensor of the plasma, the propagation of sound in the directions parallel and orthogonal to the magnetic field, the drag force of a quark moving through the medium and jet quenching.Comment: 29 pages + appendices, 5 figures. v2 Version to appear in JHEP, with minor revisions, references added and typos correcte

Spatiotemporal monthly rainfall reconstruction via artificial neural network ? case study: south of Brazil

International audienceClimatological records users, frequently, request time series for geographical locations where there is no observed meteorological attributes. Climatological conditions of the areas or points of interest have to be calculated interpolating observations in the time of neighboring stations and climate proxy. The aim of the present work is the application of reliable and robust procedures for monthly reconstruction of precipitation time series. Time series is a special case of symbolic regression and we can use Artificial Neural Network (ANN) to explore the spatiotemporal dependence of meteorological attributes. The ANN seems to be an important tool for the propagation of the related weather information to provide practical solution of uncertainties associated with interpolation, capturing the spatiotemporal structure of the data. In practice, one determines the embedding dimension of the time series attractor (delay time that determine how data are processed) and uses these numbers to define the network's architecture. Meteorological attributes can be accurately predicted by the ANN model architecture: designing, training, validation and testing; the best generalization of new data is obtained when the mapping represents the systematic aspects of the data, rather capturing the specific details of the particular training set. As illustration one takes monthly total rainfall series recorded in the period 1961?2005 in the Rio Grande do Sul ? Brazil. This reliable and robust reconstruction method has good performance and in particular, they were able to capture the intrinsic dynamic of atmospheric activities. The regional rainfall has been related to high-frequency atmospheric phenomena, such as El Niño and La Niña events, and low frequency phenomena, such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation