Nanostructured Polyelectrolyte-based System as a Toolbox for Metal Ions Detection

The capability of certain heavy metal ions to induce fluorescence decrease by a quenching mechanism suggested us to design and build a sensor potentially tunable for different ions at different concentrations. We propose a quenching-based sensor exploiting a nanostructured architecture in which fluorescent molecules (the sensing probe) are entrapped to recognize a specific analyte (heavy metal ions) through an optical transduction. The polyelectrolyte nanostructured system, named nanocapsule, improves the fluorophore-ion quenching sensitivity allowing a micromolar detection. Furthermore we couple our sensor with an electrical device in order to refine the sensing procedure: the electric field created allows a metal ions spatial gradient, necessary to detect a specific element on a single sample solution, avoiding a comparative analysis with an intensity reference value. Results obtained will show the advantages and the potentialities of our system as a smart toolbox for metal ions detection.     

Resolving overlapping peaks in ARXPS data: The effect of noise and fitting method

Peak-fitting of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) data can be very sensitive to noise when the difference on the binding energy among the peaks is smaller than the width of the peaks. This sensitivity depends on the fitting algorithm. Angle-resolved XPS (ARXPS) analysis offers the opportunity of employing the combined information contained in the data at the various angles to reduce the sensitivity to noise. The assumption of shared peak parameters (center and width) among the spectra for the different angles, and how it is introduced into the analysis, plays a basic role. Sequential fitting is the usual practice in ARXPS data peak-fitting. It consist on first estimating the center and width of the peaks from the data acquired at one of the angles, and then using those parameters as a starting approximation for fitting the data for each of the rest of the angles. An improvement of this method consists of averaging the centers and widths of the peaks obtained at the different angles, and then employing these values to assess the areas of the peaks for each angle. Another strategy for using the combined information is by assessing the peak parameters from the sum of the experimental data. The complete use of the combined information contained in the data-set is optimized by the simultaneous fitting method. It consists of the assessment of the center and width of the peaks by fitting the data at all the angles simultaneously. Computer-generated data was employed to compare the sensitivity with respect to noise between the sequential, averaged-sequential, sum, and simultaneous fitting methods. It is shown that the latter is significantly more robust and could provide reliable results even for noisy data and small peak separation. The fundamentals for the robustness of the simultaneous method are discussed, as well as the possibility of fitting many parameters at the same time. As an added feature of ARXPS, it was found that the estimation of the error intervals on the peak parameters is done remarkably more precisely by employing XPS data at various angles.     

Radon Measure-Valued Solutions for a Class of Quasilinear Parabolic Equations

Initial value problems for quasilinear parabolic equations having Radon measures as initial data have been widely investigated, looking for solutions which for positive times take values in some function space. In contrast, it is the purpose of this paper to define and investigate solutions that for positive times take values in the space of the Radon measures of the initial data. We call such solutions measure-valued, in contrast to function-valued solutionspreviously considered in the literature. We first show that there is a natural notion of measure-valued solution of problem (P) below, in spite of its nonlinear character. A major consequence of our definition is that, if the space dimension is greater than one, the concentrated part of the solution with respect to the Newtonian capacity is constant in time. Subsequently, we prove that there exists exactly one solution of the problem, such that the diffuse part with respect to the Newtonian capacity of the singular part of the solution (with respect to the Lebesgue measure) is concentrated for almost every positive time on the set where “the regular part (with respect to the Lebesgue measure) is large”. Moreover, using a family of entropy inequalities we demonstrate that the singular part of the solution is nonincreasing in time. Finally, the regularity problem is addressed, as we give conditions (depending on the space dimension, the initial data and the rate of convergence at infinity of the nonlinearity ψ) to ensure that the measure-valued solution of problem (P) is, in fact, function-valued.     

The Reduction of Benzofuroxans by Ferrous Salts and by Thiophenol

Treatment of benzofuroxan derivatives with ferrous sulphate in DMSO/water solution affords in high yield o-nitroanilines. o-Nitroaniline was also obtained by reduction of benzofuroxan with thiophenol in presence of catalytic amount of Fe²⁺ or Fe³⁺ salts.     

Quantum modified Regge–Teitelboim cosmology

In this paper we study the late evolution of Relic Gravitational Waves in coupled dark energy models, where dark energy interacts with cold dark matter. Relic Gravitational Waves are second tensorial order perturbations of the Lemaitre–Friedman–Robertson–Walker metric and experiment an evolution ruled by the scale factor of the metric. We find that the amplitude of Relic Gravitational Waves is smaller in coupled dark energy models than in models with non interacting dark energy. We also find that the amplitude of the waves predicted by the models with coupling term proportional to the dark energy density is smaller than those of the models with coupling term proportional to dark matter density.     

Synthetic Communication: Synthesis of Optically Pure Analogues of D-Arginine Methyl Ester with Antiarrhythmic Activity

The synthesis of the methyl esters of optically pure trans and cis 4-guanidinocyclohexylglycine as rigid analogues of D-arginine methyl ester are described.