Ultra high vacuum electron spectrometer for ‘DSCEMS’

Depth Selective Conversion Electron Mössbauer Spectroscopy (DSCEMS) has become a very important surface science technique during the last one decade and attracted world wide interest specially because it gives more detailed knowledge of the properties and structure of the solid surfaces. The design and details of an ultra high vacuum cylindrical mirror analyser (CMA) for DSCEMS are described and illustrated.     

An Ethenoadenine FAD Analog Accelerates UV Dimer Repair by DNA Photolyase

Reduced anionic flavin adenine dinucleotide (FADH^?) is the critical cofactor in DNA photolyase (PL) for the repair of cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPD) in UV‐damaged DNA. The initial step involves photoinduced electron transfer from *FADH^? to the CPD. The adenine (Ade) moiety is nearly stacked with the flavin ring, an unusual conformation compared to other FAD‐dependent proteins. The role of this proximity has not been unequivocally elucidated. Some studies suggest that Ade is a radical intermediate, but others conclude that Ade modulates the electron transfer rate constant (k_ET) through superexchange. No study has succeeded in removing or modifying this Ade to test these hypotheses. Here, FAD analogs containing either an ethano‐ or etheno‐bridged Ade between the AN1 and AN6 atoms (e‐FAD and ε‐FAD, respectively) were used to reconstitute apo‐PL, giving e‐PL and ε‐PL respectively. The reconstitution yield of e‐PL was very poor, suggesting that the hydrophobicity of the ethano group prevented its uptake, while ε‐PL showed 50% reconstitution yield. The substrate binding constants for ε‐PL and rPL were identical. ε‐PL showed a 15% higher steady‐state repair yield compared to FAD‐reconstituted photolyase (rPL). The acceleration of repair in ε‐PL is discussed in terms of an ε‐Ade radical intermediate vs superexchange mechanism.     

Oxidative degradation of levofloxacin by water-soluble manganese dioxide in aqueous acidic medium: a kinetic study

Pharmaceuticals, especially fluoroquinolone antibiotics, have received increasing global concern, due to their intensive use in the environment and potential harm to ecological system as well as human health. Degradation of antibiotics, such as oxidative degradation by metal oxides, often plays an important role in the elimination of antibiotics from the environment. The kinetics of oxidation of levofloxacin by water-soluble manganese dioxide has been studied in aqueous acidic medium at 25 °C temperature. The stoichiometry for the reaction indicates that the oxidation of 1 mol of levofloxacin requires 1 mol of manganese dioxide. The reaction is second order, that is first order with respect to manganese dioxide and levofloxacin. The rate of reaction increases with the increasing [H⁺] ion concentration. A probable reaction mechanism, in agreement with the observed kinetic results, has been proposed and discussed. The energy and enthalpy of activation have been calculated to be 30.54 and 28.07 kJ mol^?1, respectively.     

Efficient nonbonded interactions for molecular dynamics on a graphics processing unit

We describe an algorithm for computing nonbonded interactions with cutoffs on a graphics processing unit. We have incorporated it into OpenMM, a library for performing molecular simulations on high‐performance computer architectures. We benchmark it on a variety of systems including boxes of water molecules, proteins in explicit solvent, a lipid bilayer, and proteins with implicit solvent. The results demonstrate that its performance scales linearly with the number of atoms over a wide range of system sizes, while being significantly faster than other published algorithms. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem, 2010     

Mass–yield distributions of fission products from photo-fission of natPb induced by 50–70 MeV bremsstrahlung

The mass–yield distributions of various fission products have been determined in the 50-, 60- and 70-MeV end point bremsstrahlung induced fission of ^natPb using off-line γ-ray spectrometric technique in the electron linac at Pohang Accelerator Laboratory, Korea. The mass–yield distributions are symmetric with average mass of 102.34, 102.25 and 102.03 and FWHM of 21, 22 and 23 mass unit, respectively. From the present data and literature data in the 50–85 MeV bremsstrahlung induced fission of ²⁰⁹Bi the following observations were obtained: (i) The average masses of the yield distributions in the 50–85 MeV bremsstrahlung induced fission of ^natPb and ²⁰⁹Bi are around 102.25 ± 0.25 and 103 ± 0.5, respectively. (ii) The FWHM of the mass–yield distributions increases from about 21 mass units at 50 MeV to 23 mass units at 70–85 MeV, which is explained from the point of increase in multi-chance fission probability with increasing excitation energy. (iii) Within the bremsstrahlung energy range of 50–85 MeV, the role of nuclear structure effect in the mass–yield distribution was observed in the photo-fission of ²⁰⁹Bi, whereas it was not seen in case of ^natPb. This may be due to the presence of so many isotopes in ^natPb unlike mono-isotopic ²⁰⁹Bi.     

PAPER—Accelerating parallel evaluations of ROCS

Modern graphics processing units (GPUs) are flexibly programmable and have peak computational throughput significantly faster than conventional CPUs. Herein, we describe the design and implementation of PAPER, an open‐source implementation of Gaussian molecular shape overlay for NVIDIA GPUs. We demonstrate one to two order‐of‐magnitude speedups on high‐end commodity GPU hardware relative to a reference CPU implementation of the shape overlay algorithm and speedups of over one order of magnitude relative to the commercial OpenEye ROCS package. In addition, we describe errors incurred by approximations used in common implementations of the algorithm. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Comput Chem 2010     

On certain q-analogue of Sz��sz Kantorovich operators

In the present paper we propose q-analogue of the well known Sz??sz-Kantorovich operators. We study local approximation as well as weighted approximation properties of these new operators.     

NIR to visible upconversion in Er/Yb co-doped CaYAl3O7 phosphor obtained by solution combustion process

Using the combustion synthesis, CaYAl₃O₇:Er³⁺ phosphor powders co-doped with Yb³⁺ have been prepared at low temperatures (550 °C) in a few minutes. Formation of the compound was confirmed by X-ray powder diffraction. Near-infrared to visible upconversion fluorescence emission in the Er³⁺ doped CaYAl₃O₇ phosphor powder has been observed. The effect of co-doping with triply ionized ytterbium in the CaYAl₃O₇:Er³⁺ phosphor has been studied and the process involved is discussed.     

Observation of quantum jumps in a superconducting artificial atom

We continuously measure the state of a superconducting quantum bit coupled to a microwave readout cavity by using a fast, ultralow-noise parametric amplifier. This arrangement allows us to observe quantum jumps between the qubit states in real time, and should enable quantum error correction and feedback--essential components of quantum information processing.     

Experimental study of resistive bistability in metal oxide junctions

We have studied resistive bistability (memory) effects in junctions based on metal oxides, with a focus on sample-to-sample reproducibility, which is necessary for the use of such junctions as crosspoint devices of hybrid CMOS/nanoelectronic circuits. Few-nm-thick layers of NbO _x , CuO _x and TiO _x have been formed by thermal and plasma oxidation, at various deposition and oxidation conditions, both with and without rapid thermal post-annealing. The resistive bistability effect has been observed for all these materials, with particularly high endurance (over 10³ switching cycles) obtained for single-layer TiO₂ junctions, and the best reproducibility reached for multi-layer junctions of the same material. Fabrication optimization has allowed us to improve the OFF/ON resistance ratio to about 10³, but the sample-to-sample reproducibility is so far lower than that required for large-scale integration.