Thermal Raman study of Li4Ti5O12 and discussion about the number of its characteristic bands

Lithium battery industry is booming, and this fast growth should be supported by developing industry friendly tools to control the quality of positive and negative electrode materials. Raman spectroscopy was shown to be a cost effective and sensitive instrument to study defects and heterogeneities in lithium titanate, popular negative electrode material for high power applications, but there are still some points to be clarified. This work presents a detailed thermal Raman study for lithium titanate and discusses the difference of the number of predicted and experimentally observed Raman-active bands. The low temperature study and the analysis of thermal shifts of bands positions during heating let us to conclude about advantages of the proposed approach with surplus bands and recommend using shifts of major band to estimate the sample heating

Public political narratives: developing a neglected source through the exploratory case of Russia in the Putin-Medvedev era

The place of narrative in political science is an issue that resurfaces with regularity, usually focusing on the questions of generalisability, evidence and causality which lie at the heart of the discipline. Most such debate concerns the use of narrative by political scientists. Far less attention has been devoted to the use of narrative by political actors, despite its relative ubiquity. Even where such attention has been given, it concentrates less on the narrative per se, and more on its performance and impact. However, the nature of public political narratives means that analysis of them facilitates a holistic understanding of their narrators' politics. A public political narrative consists of a sequential account given by political actors connecting selected, specific developments so as to impose a desired order on them. Taking contemporary Russia as an exploratory case, narrative analysis draws out the motivations, world view and inconsistencies within the Putin-Medvedev regime. Recurring motifs and symbols identify the regime's political priorities, explaining policy choices and revealing future concerns. Narrative has a predictive aspect, identifying likely policy responses to unexpected events. Narratives capture time, and shifts in their temporalities indicate changes in self-conceptualisation and political priorities. Temporal appropriations include or exclude particular agential and causal explanations. The relationship between their plots and subplots represents a political signalling process. Public political narratives provide temporally and spatially specific exceptionalist accounts, but their combinatory quality also facilitates comparative analysis. The approach essayed here provides methodological generalisability, arguing that the neglect of public political narratives merits correcting

Surgical outcomes in patients with drug-resistant bilateral temporal lobe epilepsy confirmed via magnetic resonance imaging

Introduction. In patients with drug-resistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE), surgical treatment is aimed to resect an epileptogenic zone (EZ) followed by seizure control. Despite complicated EZ location, surgical resection should be considered as a treatment of choice in bilateral TLE. Objective: to evaluate surgical outcomes and factors contributing to outcomes in patients with drug-resistant bilateral TLE confirmed via magnetic resonance imaging. Materials and methods. The study included patients with unilateral (n = 50) and bilateral (n = 50) temporal lobe involvement. The results of surgical treatment were evaluated according to the classification of J. Engel (1993). Results. Favorable outcomes of surgical treatment (Engel I and Engel II) in the group with unilateral temporal lobe involvement were found in 98% of patients after 12 months, in 88% after 24 months, and in 100% after 48 and 60 months after surgery. In the group with bilateral temporal lobe involvement outcomes of surgical treatment were favorable in 41% of patients after 12 months, in 50% after 24 months, in 39% after 48 months, and in 50% of patients after 60 months post-surgery. Conclusion. Early onset, burdened perinatal history, and MRI-confirmed left temporal lobe involvement contribute to the poor outcome (Engel III and Engel IV) in the bilateral TLE group. Engel I outcomes were more common in the patients with unilateral TLE while Engel IIIV outcomes were more common in the patients with bilateral TLE

The T7-Related Pseudomonas putida Phage ϕ15 Displays Virion-Associated Biofilm Degradation Properties

Formation of a protected biofilm environment is recognized as one of the major causes of the increasing antibiotic resistance development and emphasizes the need to develop alternative antibacterial strategies, like phage therapy. This study investigates the in vitro degradation of single-species Pseudomonas putida biofilms, PpG1 and RD5PR2, by the novel phage ϕ15, a ‘T7-like virus’ with a virion-associated exopolysaccharide (EPS) depolymerase. Phage ϕ15 forms plaques surrounded by growing opaque halo zones, indicative for EPS degradation, on seven out of 53 P. putida strains. The absence of haloes on infection resistant strains suggests that the EPS probably act as a primary bacterial receptor for phage infection. Independent of bacterial strain or biofilm age, a time and dose dependent response of ϕ15-mediated biofilm degradation was observed with generally a maximum biofilm degradation 8 h after addition of the higher phage doses (104 and 106 pfu) and resistance development after 24 h. Biofilm age, an in vivo very variable parameter, reduced markedly phage-mediated degradation of PpG1 biofilms, while degradation of RD5PR2 biofilms and ϕ15 amplification were unaffected. Killing of the planktonic culture occurred in parallel with but was always more pronounced than biofilm degradation, accentuating the need for evaluating phages for therapeutic purposes in biofilm conditions. EPS degrading activity of recombinantly expressed viral tail spike was confirmed by capsule staining. These data suggests that the addition of high initial titers of specifically selected phages with a proper EPS depolymerase are crucial criteria in the development of phage therapy

Software for the frontiers of quantum chemistry:An overview of developments in the Q-Chem 5 package

This article summarizes technical advances contained in the fifth major release of the Q-Chem quantum chemistry program package, covering developments since 2015. A comprehensive library of exchange–correlation functionals, along with a suite of correlated many-body methods, continues to be a hallmark of the Q-Chem software. The many-body methods include novel variants of both coupled-cluster and configuration-interaction approaches along with methods based on the algebraic diagrammatic construction and variational reduced density-matrix methods. Methods highlighted in Q-Chem 5 include a suite of tools for modeling core-level spectroscopy, methods for describing metastable resonances, methods for computing vibronic spectra, the nuclear–electronic orbital method, and several different energy decomposition analysis techniques. High-performance capabilities including multithreaded parallelism and support for calculations on graphics processing units are described. Q-Chem boasts a community of well over 100 active academic developers, and the continuing evolution of the software is supported by an “open teamware” model and an increasingly modular design

Harnessing stochasticity for superconductive multi-layer spike-rate-coded neuromorphic networks

Conventional semiconductor-based integrated circuits are gradually approaching fundamental scaling limits. Many prospective solutions have recently emerged to supplement or replace both the technology on which basic devices are built and the architecture of data processing. Neuromorphic circuits are a promising approach to computing where techniques used by the brain to achieve high efficiency are exploited. Many existing neuromorphic circuits rely on unconventional and useful properties of novel technologies to better mimic the operation of the brain. One such technology is single flux quantum (SFQ) logic—a cryogenic superconductive technology in which the data are represented by quanta of magnetic flux (fluxons) produced and processed by Josephson junctions embedded within inductive loops. The movement of a fluxon within a circuit produces a quantized voltage pulse (SFQ pulse), resembling a neuronal spiking event. These circuits routinely operate at clock frequencies of tens to hundreds of gigahertz, making SFQ a natural technology for processing high frequency pulse trains. This work harnesses thermal stochasticity in superconducting synapses to emulate stochasticity in biological synapses in which the synapse probabilistically propagates or blocks incoming spikes. The authors also present neuronal, fan-in, and fan-out circuitry inspired by the literature that seamlessly cascade with the synapses for deep neural network construction. Synapse weights and neuron biases are set with bias current, and the authors propose multiple mechanisms for training the network and storing weights. The network primitives are successfully demonstrated in simulation in the context of a rate-coded multi-layer XOR neural network which achieves a wide classification margin. The proposed methodology is based solely on existing SFQ technology and does not employ unconventional superconductive devices or semiconductor transistors, making this proposed system an effective approach for scalable cryogenic neuromorphic computing

Soft modes condensation in Raman spectra of (Pb–La)(Zr–Sn–Ti)O3 ceramics

Текст статьи не публикуется в открытом доступе в соответствии с политикой журнала.Исследованы низкочастотные спектры комбинационного рассеяния керамики (Pb0:97La0:02)Zr0:864Sn0:04Ti0:096O3 в области фазового перехода из кубической в антисегнетоэлектрическую фазу при 200 С. В дополнение к ранее известной моде при 100 см-1, обнаружена группа низкочастотных мягких мод, восстанавливающихся ниже точки перехода. У этих мод в точке перехода наблюдаются резкие аномалии, что позволяет предположить существенное межмодовое взаимодействие через затухание

Gallium Composition-Dependent Structural Phase Transitions in HoFe3–xGax(BO3)4 Solid Solutions: Crystal Growth, Structure, and Raman Spectroscopy Study

Текст статьи не публикуется в открытом доступе в соответствии с политикой журнала.Single crystals of solid solutions of HoFe3–xGax(BO3)4 with x = 0, 0.5, 1, 1.5, and 3 were obtained using flux synthesis. The conditions of the synthesis are described in detail. The structural properties of each of the synthesized samples were studied using X-ray powder diffraction analysis at several temperature points (303, 403, and 503 K). The structural parameters of the obtained samples and the “pure” compounds HoFe3(BO3)4 and HoGa3(BO3)4 were compared. The Raman spectra of the obtained solid solutions HoFe3–xGax(BO3)4 were studied in a wide temperature range (T = 10–400 K). The vibrational spectra and eigenvectors of the HoFe3Ga(BO3)4 and HoGa3(BO3)4 in R32 phase and HoFe3Ga(BO3)4 in P3121 phase were calculated within density functional theory. The features of the Raman spectra of HoFe2Ga(BO3)4, HoFe2.5Ga0.5(BO3)4, HoFe3(BO3)4 crystals associated with the R32 → P3121 structural phase transition, which have a strong dependence on the degree of substitution x, were investigated. Peculiarities of the Raman spectra, which are associated with magnetic ordering in HoFe1.5Ga1.5(BO3)4, HoFe2Ga(BO3)4, and HoFe2.5Ga0.5(BO3)4 crystals, were detected