Gullies on Mars: Origin by snow and ice melting and potential for life based on possible analogs from Devon Island, High Arctic

Gullies on Devon Island, High Arctic, which form by melting of transient surface ice and snow covers and offer morphologic and contextual analogs for gullies reported on Mars are reported to display enhancements in biological activity in contrast to surrounding polar desert terrain

N-Triflylphosphorimidoyl Trichloride: A Versatile Reagent for the Synthesis of Strong Chiral Brønsted Acids

A series of strong Brønsted acids has been synthesized in high yields using N-triflylphosphorimidoyl trichloride as reagent. The syntheses proceed efficiently with electron-rich, electron-deficient, and sterically hindered substrates

Double-heterostructure GaAs-GaAIAs injection lasers on semi-insulating substrates using carrier crowding

GaAs‐GaAlAs double‐heterostructure lasers were fabricated on semi‐insulating substrates. Laser action based on carrier confinement via the crowding effect has been demonstrated. Laser action takes place in a narrow (10–20 μm) region near the edge of the mesa where the current is injected. The threshold current is low and is comparable to that of stripe‐geometry lasers

Superconducting energy gap in MgCNi3 single crystals: Point-contact spectroscopy and specific-heat measurements

Specific heat has been measured down to 600 mK and up to 8 Tesla by the highly sensitive AC microcalorimetry on the MgCNi3 single crystals with Tc ~ 7 K. Exponential decay of the electronic specific heat at low temperatures proved that a superconducting energy gap is fully open on the whole Fermi surface, in agreement with our previous magnetic penetration depth measurements on the same crystals. The specific-heat data analysis shows consistently the strong coupling strength 2D/kTc ~ 4. This scenario is supported by the direct gap measurements via the point-contact spectroscopy. Moreover, the spectroscopy measurements show a decrease in the critical temperature at the sample surface accounting for the observed differences of the superfluid density deduced from the measurements by different techniques

Identifying Sneutrino Dark Matter: Interplay between the LHC and Direct Search

Under R-parity, the lightest supersymmetric particle (LSP) is stable and may serve as a good dark matter candidate. The R-parity can be naturally introduced with a gauge origin at TeV scale. We go over why a TeV scale B-L gauge extension of the minimal supersymmetric standard model (MSSM) is one of the most natural, if not demanded, low energy supersymmetric models. In the presence of a TeV scale Abelian gauge symmetry, the (predominantly) right-handed sneutrino LSP can be a good dark matter candidate. Its identification at the LHC is challenging because it does not carry any standard model charge. We show how we can use the correlation between the LHC experiments (dilepton resonance signals) and the direct dark matter search experiments (such as CDMS and XENON) to identify the right-handed sneutrino LSP dark matter in the B-L extended MSSM.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figure