The first three anisotropy constants of nickel

The technique of ferromagnetic resonance at 23 GHz has been used to determine the first three anisotropy constants of pure Ni down to 4.2K. A temperature and orientation dependent linewidth has also been observed.     

Kinetic and mechanistic studies of the hydrolysis of sulfamate esters: a non-elimination decomposition route

The kinetics of hydrolysis at pH 2 and ionic strength (μ) = 1 of a series of sulfamate esters p-XC₆H₄OSO₂NH₂ have been examined using structure- and solvent-reactivity studies, thermodynamic data, a ‘nucleophilicity test’ and a kinetic solvent isotope effect to probe the mechanism of the hydrolysis. These esters can be regarded as models for the more complex medicinally and biologically important esters now under extensive study. The mechanism of hydrolysis involves the neutral ester undergoing nucleophilic attack by water in a bimolecular TS.     

Manifold preprocessing for laser‐induced breakdown spectroscopy under Mars conditions

Laser‐induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) is currently being used onboard the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity to predict elemental abundances in dust, rocks, and soils using a partial least squares regression model developed by the ChemCam team. Accuracy of that model is constrained by the number of samples needed in the calibration, which grows exponentially with the dimensionality of the data, a phenomenon known as the curse of dimensionality. LIBS data are very high dimensional, and the number of ground‐truth samples (i.e., standards) recorded with the ChemCam before departing for Mars was small compared with the dimensionality, so strategies to optimize prediction accuracy are needed. In this study, we first use an existing machine learning algorithm, locally linear embedding (LLE), to combat the curse of dimensionality by embedding the data into a low‐dimensional manifold subspace before regressing. LLE constructs its embedding by maintaining local neighborhood distances and discarding large global geodesic distances between samples, in an attempt to preserve the underlying geometric structure of the data. We also introduce a novel supervised version, LLE for regression (LLER), which takes into account the known chemical composition of the training data when embedding. LLER is shown to outperform traditional LLE when predicting most major elements. We show the effectiveness of both algorithms using three different LIBS datasets recorded under Mars‐like conditions. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Ultrasonic sensor to characterize wood pulp during refining

A novel sensor concept has been developed for measuring the degree of refining, the water retention value (WRV), and the weight percentage of wood pulp during the refining process. The measurement time is less than 5 min and the sensor can operate in a slip-stream of the process line or as an at-line instrument. The degree of refining and the WRV are determined from settling measurements. The settling of a pulp suspension (with a weight percentage less than 0.5 wt%) is observed, after the mixer, which keeps the pulp uniformly distributed, is turned off. The attenuation of ultrasound as a function of time is recorded and these data show a peak at a time designated as the "peak time." The peak time T increases with the degree of refining, as demonstrated by measuring pulp samples with known degrees of refining. The WRV can be determined using the relative peak time, defined as the ratio T(2)/T(1), where T(1) is an initial peak time and T(2) is the value after additional refining. This method offers an alternative WRV test for the industry to the current time-consuming method.     

Do columnar defects produce bulk pinning?

From magneto-optical imaging performed on heavy-ion-irradiated YBa(2)Cu(3)O(7-delta) single crystals, it is found that at fields and temperatures where strong single vortex pinning by individual irradiation-induced amorphous columnar defects is to be expected, vortex motion is limited by the nucleation of vortex kinks at the specimen surface. In the material bulk, vortex motion occurs through (easy) kink sliding. Depinning in the bulk determines the screening current only at fields comparable to or larger than the matching field, at which the majority of vortices is not trapped by an ion track.