Sul movimento di un punto non soggetto ad alcuna forza sopra un toro

Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo Series 1 -     

Oxygen depletion in electron beam bombarded glass surfaces studied by XPS

XPS has been utilized to study the compositional changes which occur in glass after electron beam irradiation. In the bombarded surfaces a reduction in Na and O signals is observed, while Ca signal shows negligible variations. Two O_1s signals, assigned to bridging and non-bridging oxygen were found. Irradiation causes a decrease of these two types of oxygen. This is at variance with Lineweaver's mechanism which accounts for the decrease of the non-bridging oxygens only. After irradiation a second component in the Si_2p line is found. It has been attributed to the formation of SiSi bonds induced by oxygen outgassing. The formation of these bonds leads to a more compact structure and this might explain the observed density change in irradiated glass.     

Freeze-fracture electron microscopy and light scattering studies on polyethylcyanoacrylate nanocapsule colloidal suspensions

Summary Nanocapsule preparative procedures are able to change the availability of drugs from delivery devices. In particular, the influence of the organic solvent, used in the interfacial polymerisation process, on the shape, mean particle size, size distribution and type of colloidal suspension was investigated. The organic solvents employed in the preparation of PECA nanocapsules were ethanol, acetone or acetonitrile. A non-ionic surfactant (Pluronic F68) was used during the preparation process. The amount of monomer represented another variable, capable of influencing the final carrier properties of PECA nanocapsules. The presence of ethanol achieved the formation of both nanoparticles and nanocapsules. However, the presence of acetone or acetonitrile achieved not only a highly homogeneous size colloidal system, but also the formation of only one type of PECA nanosphere (nanocapsule). The different amount of monomer led to the formation of nanocapsules with a wall thickness proportional to the initial concentration of the polymerising agent. Paper presented at the I International Conference on Scaling Concepts and Complex Fluids, Copanello, Italy, July 4–8, 1994.     

Fast,Practical Algorithms for Computing All the Repeats in a String

Given a string x = x[1..n] on an alphabet of size α, and a threshold p _min ≥ 1, we describe four variants of an algorithm PSY1 that, using a suffix array, computes all the complete nonextendible repeats in x of length p ≥ p _min . The basic algorithm PSY1–1 and its simple extension PSY1–2 are fast on strings that occur in biological, natural language and other applications (not highly periodic strings), while PSY1–3 guarantees Θ(n) worst-case execution time. The final variant, PSY1–4, also achieves Θ(n) processing time and, over the complete range of strings tested, is the fastest of the four. The space requirement of all four algorithms is about 5n bytes, but all make use of the “longest common prefix” (LCP) array, whose construction requires about 6n bytes. The four algorithms are faster in applications and use less space than a recently-proposed algorithm (Narisawa in Proceedings of 18th Annual Symposium on Combinatorial Pattern Matching, pp. 340–351, 2007) that produces equivalent output. The suffix array is not explicitly used by algorithms PSY1, but may be required for postprocessing; in this case, storage requirements rise to 9n bytes. We also describe two variants of a fast Θ(n)-time algorithm PSY2 for computing all complete supernonextendible repeats in x.     

Sul movimento di un punto pesante sopra una superficie di rivoluzione

Rendiconti del Circolo Matematico di Palermo Series 1 -     

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight/time-of-flight tandem mass spectra of poly(butylene adipate)

Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight/time-of-flight tandem mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS/MS) was employed to analyze four poly(butylene adipate) (PBAd) oligomers and to investigate their fragmentation pathways as a continuation of our work on the MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS/MS study of synthetic polymers. MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS/MS analysis was performed on oligomers terminated by carboxyl and hydroxyl groups, methyl adipate and hydroxyl groups, dihydroxyl groups, and dicarboxyl groups. The sodium adducts of these oligomers were selected as precursor ions. Different end groups do not influence the fragmentation of sodiated polyester oligomers and similar series of product ions were observed in all the MALDI-TOF/TOF-MS/MS spectra. According to the structures of the most abundant product ions identified in the present work, three fragmentation pathways have been proposed to occur most frequently in PBAd: beta-hydrogen-transfer rearrangement, leading to the selective cleavage of the --O--CH(2)-- bonds; --CH(2)--CH(2)-- (beta--beta) bond cleavage in the adipate moiety; and ester bond scission.     

Pyramid sensor for segmented mirror alignment

We report what is to our knowledge the first laboratory experiment that shows the use of a pyramid wavefront sensor to cophase and align segmented mirrors having three degrees of freedom per segment, i.e., piston, tip, and tilt. In the laboratory the iterative alignment procedure reached a wavefront residual error of about 10 nm. The residual error was equally distributed between piston, tip, and tilt. These results demonstrate that the pyramid can successfully simultaneously sense the piston, tip, and tilt of a segmented mirror. This last feature makes this technique very attractive in phasing and aligning astronomical segmented telescopes such as extremely large telescopes currently under extensive studies.     

Fluctuations of internal energy flow in a vibrated granular gas

The nonequilibrium fluctuations of power flux in a fluidized granular media have been recently measured in an experiment [Phys. Rev. Lett. 92, 164301 (2004)], which was announced to be a verification of the fluctuation relation (FR) by Gallavotti and Cohen. An effective temperature was also identified and proposed to be a useful probe for such nonequilibrium systems. We explain these results in terms of a two-temperature Poisson process. Within this model, supported by independent molecular dynamics simulations, power flux fluctuations do not satisfy the FR and the nature of the effective temperature is clarified. In the pursuit of a hypothetical global quantity fulfilling the FR, this points to the need of considering candidates other than the power flux.     

Si/SiO<Subscript>2</Subscript> core shell clusters probed by Raman spectroscopy

Using a pulsed microplasma source, clusters were produced through the ablation of a Si cathode and successive supersonic expansion. The Si cluster beam was deposited onto different substrates and the partial oxidation of the cluster surface avoided the growth of large agglomerates, preserving their nanocrystalline morphology. Micro-Raman spectroscopy was used for an accurate size diagnosis of the deposited nanoparticles. The size of the Si dots ranges between 2 and about 15 nm. The Si dots appear to have a Si oxide shell, as confirmed also by structural and compositional analysis through transmission electron microscopy and atomic force microscopy. Double Raman peaks were attributed to small Si agglomerates having a thin substoichiometric Si-O interface.