Role of cleaning methods on bond quality of Ti coated glass/imidex system

Thin film materials are widely used in the fabrication of semiconductor microelectronic devices. In thin film deposition, cleanliness of substrate surface have become critically important as over 50% of yield losses in integrated circuit fabrication are caused by microcontamination [1]. There are many wafer cleaning techniques. The most successful approach for silicon wafer cleaning technique is RCA clean [2]. But for glass substrate it is still not known which procedure of cleaning is the best. This paper provides an understanding of the right way of glass wafer cleaning method, with a focus towards identifying good bond strength. Two wafer cleaning techniques have been used for cleaning glass substrates in the context of laser micro-joining of dissimilar substrates. First cleaning procedure involves two steps, first cleaning in acetone solution and then in DI water solution. After each step dried with N₂. Second cleaning procedure involves four steps, first cleaning with 1% Alconox solution, second in DI water, third in acetone solution and finally in a methanol solution and dried with N₂ after each step. Deposition of Ti thin film on top of these two types of substrate using DC magnetron sputtering method also showed better adhesion of Ti film on glass for the second type of cleaning method. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analyses of the lap shear tested failed surfaces for these two kinds of samples revealed strong bond for samples prepared by second cleaning method compared to first cleaning method. Characterization of these two sets of samples using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) has shown excellent contamination removal for the second cleaning method. This modification is believed to be due to reduction of carbon contamination.     

In vivo SNR in DENSE MRI; temporal and regional effects of field strength, receiver coil sensitivity and flip angle strategies

Aim

The influences on the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of Displacement ENcoding with Stimulated Echoes (DENSE) MRI of field strength, receiver coil sensitivity and choice of flip angle strategy have been previously investigated individually. In this study, all of these parameters have been investigated in the same setting, and a mutual comparison of their impact on SNR is presented.

Materials and methods

Ten healthy volunteers were imaged in a 1.5 T and a 3 T MRI system, using standard five- or six-channel cardiac coils as well as 32-channel coils, with four different excitation patterns. Variation of spatial coil sensitivity was assessed by regional SNR analysis.

Results

SNR ranging from 2.8 to 30.5 was found depending on the combination of excitation patterns, coil sensitivity and field strength. The SNR at 3 T was 53±26% higher than at 1.5 T (P<.001), whereas spatial differences of 59±26% were found in the ventricle (P<.001). Thirty-two-channel coils provided 52±29% higher SNR compared to standard five- or six-channel coils (P<.001). A fixed flip angle strategy provided an excess of 50% higher SNR in half of the imaged cardiac cycle compared to a sweeping flip angle strategy, and a single-phase acquisition provided a sixfold increase of SNR compared to a cine acquisition.

Conclusion

The effect of field strength and receiver coil sensitivity influences the SNR with the same order of magnitude, whereas flip angle strategy can have a larger effect on SNR. Thus, careful choice of imaging hardware in combination with adaptation of the acquisition protocol is crucial in order to realize sufficient SNR in DENSE MRI.     

On the core of cost-revenue games: Minimum cost spanning tree games with revenues

In this paper, we analyze cost sharing problems arising from a general service by explicitly taking into account the generated revenues. To this cost-revenue sharing problem, we associate a cooperative game with transferable utility, called cost-revenue game. By considering cooperation among the agents using the general service, the value of a coalition is defined as the maximum net revenues that the coalition may obtain by means of cooperation. As a result, a coalition may profit from not allowing all its members to get the service that generates the revenues. We focus on the study of the core of cost-revenue games. Under the assumption that cooperation among the members of the grand coalition grants the use of the service under consideration to all its members, it is shown that a cost-revenue game has a nonempty core for any vector of revenues if, and only if, the dual game of the cost game has a large core. Using this result, we investigate minimum cost spanning tree games with revenues. We show that if every connection cost can take only two values (low or high cost), then, the corresponding minimum cost spanning tree game with revenues has a nonempty core. Furthermore, we provide an example of a minimum cost spanning tree game with revenues with an empty core where every connection cost can take only one of three values (low, medium, or high cost).     

On extensions of the core and the anticore of transferable utility games

We consider several related set extensions of the core and the anticore of games with transferable utility. An efficient allocation is undominated if it cannot be improved, in a specific way, by sidepayments changing the allocation or the game. The set of all such allocations is called the undominated set, and we show that it consists of finitely many polytopes with a core-like structure. One of these polytopes is the $L_1$ -center, consisting of all efficient allocations that minimize the sum of the absolute values of the excesses. The excess Pareto optimal set contains the allocations that are Pareto optimal in the set obtained by ordering the sums of the absolute values of the excesses of coalitions and the absolute values of the excesses of their complements. The $L_1$ -center is contained in the excess Pareto optimal set, which in turn is contained in the undominated set. For three-person games all these sets coincide. These three sets also coincide with the core for balanced games and with the anticore for antibalanced games. We study properties of these sets and provide characterizations in terms of balanced collections of coalitions. We also propose a single-valued selection from the excess Pareto optimal set, the min-prenucleolus, which is defined as the prenucleolus of the minimum of a game and its dual.     

Self-Duality of Polytopes and its Relations to Vertex Enumeration and Graph Isomorphism

We study the complexity of determining whether a polytope given by its vertices or facets is combinatorially isomorphic to its polar dual. We prove that this problem is Graph Isomorphism hard, and that it is Graph Isomorphism complete if and only if Vertex Enumeration is Graph Isomorphism easy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first problem that is not equivalent to Vertex Enumeration and whose complexity status has a non-trivial impact on the complexity of Vertex Enumeration irrespective of whether checking Self-duality turns out to be strictly harder than Graph Isomorphism or equivalent to Graph Isomorphism. The constructions employed in the proof yield a class of self-dual polytopes that are interesting on their own. In particular, this class of self-dual polytopes has the property that the facet-vertex incident matrix of the polytope is transposable if and only if the matrix is symmetrizable as well. As a consequence of this construction, we also prove that checking self-duality of a polytope, given by its facet-vertex incidence matrix, is Graph Isomorphism complete, thereby answering a question of Kaibel and Schwartz.     

On the invariant faces associated with a cone-preserving map

For an nonnegative matrix , an isomorphism is obtained between the lattice of initial subsets (of ) for and the lattice of -invariant faces of the nonnegative orthant . Motivated by this isomorphism, we generalize some of the known combinatorial spectral results on a nonnegative matrix that are given in terms of its classes to results for a cone-preserving map on a polyhedral cone, formulated in terms of its invariant faces. In particular, we obtain the following extension of the famous Rothblum index theorem for a nonnegative matrix: If leaves invariant a polyhedral cone , then for each distinguished eigenvalue of for , there is a chain of distinct -invariant join-irreducible faces of , each containing in its relative interior a generalized eigenvector of corresponding to (referred to as semi-distinguished -invariant faces associated with ), where is the maximal order of distinguished generalized eigenvectors of corresponding to , but there is no such chain with more than members. We introduce the important new concepts of semi-distinguished -invariant faces, and of spectral pairs of faces associated with a cone-preserving map, and obtain several properties of a cone-preserving map that mostly involve these two concepts, when the underlying cone is polyhedral, perfect, or strictly convex and/or smooth, or is the cone of all real polynomials of degree not exceeding that are nonnegative on a closed interval. Plentiful illustrative examples are provided. Some open problems are posed at the end.