A novel drum piezoelectric-actuator

This paper presents a large displacement, piezoelectric-metal structure actuator, named the piezoelectric drum actuator. The drum actuator consists of a short, thick-walled steel cylinder sandwiched by two thin composite disks, which are fabricated from a brass disk bonded with a piezoceramic disk. The piezoceramic disk, which is polarized in its thickness direction, has a large diameter thickness ratio, producing a large radial displacement under an applied voltage in the thickness, leading to a large transverse deflection of the composite disks in the drum. The drum (outer diameter: 12.0 mm) has a displacement that is about eight times larger than that of a cymbal actuator made with the same ceramic material and comparable dimensions under the same dc driving voltage of 270 V. The drum actuator also showed a large resonance displacement of 56.7 μm under an ac voltage of 90 V. The effective piezoelectric charge coefficient d’₃₃ of the drum is about twice as large as that reported for the cymbal. PACS 77.65 -j; 85.50.+k; 43.38.fx     

An 15N NMR spin relaxation dispersion study of the folding of a pair of engineered mutants of apocytochrome b562

15N relaxation dispersion NMR spectroscopy has been used to study exchange dynamics in a pair of mutants of Rd-apocyt b562, a redesigned four-helix-bundle protein. An analysis of the relaxation data over a range of temperatures establishes that exchange in both proteins is best modeled as two-state and that it derives from the folding/unfolding transition. These results are in accord with predictions based on the reaction coordinate for the folding of the protein determined from native-state hydrogen exchange data [Chu, R.; Pei, W.; Takei, J.; Bai, Y. Biochemistry 2002, 41, 7998-8003]. The kinetics and thermodynamics of the folding transition have been characterized in detail. Although only a narrow range of temperatures could be examined, it is clear that the folding rate temperature profile is distinctly non-Arrhenius for both mutants, with the folding barrier for at least one of them entropic.     

Doped Mott insulators are insulators: hole localization in the cuprates

We demonstrate that a Mott insulator lightly doped with holes is still an insulator at low temperature even without disorder. Hole localization obtains because the chemical potential lies in a pseudogap which has a vanishing density of states at zero temperature. The energy scale for the pseudogap is set by the nearest-neighbor singlet-triplet splitting. As this energy scale vanishes if transitions, virtual or otherwise, to the upper Hubbard band are not permitted, the fundamental length scale in the pseudogap regime is the average distance between doubly occupied sites. Consequently, the pseudogap is tied to the noncommutativity of the two limits U-->infinity (U the on-site Coulomb repulsion) and L -->infinity (the system size).     

Influence of ambient oxygen pressure on the preferred orientation, microstructures, and dielectric properties of (Ba1-xSrx)TiO3 thin films with compositionally graded structures

Compositionally graded (Ba_1-xSr_x)TiO₃ (BST) thin films, with x decreasing from 0.25 to 0.0, were deposited on Pt(111)/Ti/SiO₂/Si(100) substrates by pulsed-laser ablation at 600 °C and under ambient oxygen pressures ranging from 50 to 400 mTorr. The influence of the ambient gas pressure on the preferred orientation, microstructures, and dielectric properties of compositionally graded BST films was investigated by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, and dielectric frequency spectra, respectively. As the ambient oxygen pressure was increased, the preferred orientation evolved in the order: (100)+(110)(110)+(111) random orientation, and the surface roughness of the graded BST films also increased. The graded BST films deposited at high ambient oxygen pressures (300400 mTorr) exhibited a grainy structure with polycrystalline grains throughout the film thickness, whereas the graded films deposited at low ambient oxygen pressures (50200 mTorr) possessed a columnar structure. The evolution of the microstructure was ascribed to the different physical and chemical properties of the species that were incident onto the substrates at the various oxygen pressures. The dielectric properties of the graded BST films were dependent upon the ambient oxygen pressures. The graded BST films deposited at 200 mTorr exhibited the highest dielectric constant. PACS 77.55.+f; 77.22.Ch; 81.15.Fg     

Thermal expansion of ultradrawn polystyrene

Measurements on the linear thermal expansivities α∥ and α⊥ parallel and perpendicular to the extrusion direction, respectively, have been carried out between ?160 and 30°C for atactic polystyrene (aPS) with extrusion ratio 1 ≤λ≤ 15 and isotactic polystyrene (iPS) with 1 ≤λ≤ 7.5. For both aPS and iPS, α∥ decreases sharply with increasing λ whereas α⊥ shows only a slight increase. Below λ = 5 the anisotropy α⊥/α∥ is nearly the same for both, but α⊥/α∥ for iPS becomes much larger at higher λ. This is accompanied by an abrupt rise in crystallinity and probably results from the increase in the number and tautness of intercrystalline tie molecules. The birefringences of aPS and iPS increase with λ and have nearly the same values for λ < 5. At higher λ, however, there is a sharp rise in the birefringence of iPS which is probably associated with the sudden increase in crystallinity. With an aggregate model, the chain orientation function for aPS calculated from thermal expansivity is found to be in reasonable agreement with the corresponding value obtained from birefringence.     

Sparse distance metric learning

Nearest neighbour classification requires a good distance metric. Previous approaches try to learn a quadratic distance metric learning so that observations of different classes are well separated. For high-dimensional problems, where many uninformative variables are present, it is attractive to select a sparse distance metric, both to increase predictive accuracy but also to aid interpretation of the result. We investigate the \(\ell 1\) -regularized metric learning problem, making a connection with the Lasso algorithm in the linear least squared settings. We show that the fitted transformation matrix is close to the desired transformation matrix in \(\ell 1\) -norm by assuming a version of the compatibility condition.     

Charge dynamics in solar cells with a blend of π-conjugated polymer-fullerene studied by transient photo-generated voltage

The biphasic feature of transient photo-generated voltage (TPV) is investigated in organic solar cells (OSCs) with a blend active layer of poly(3-hexylthiophene) (P3HT) and phenyl C61 butyric acid methyl ester (PCBM). The positive and negative components in biphasic TPV are explained through PCBM only and P3HT only devices. The negative and positive components are ascribed to the dipole formation at the buried interface of P3HT/indium tin oxide (ITO) and PCBM/ITO respectively. Based on these findings, two fundamental phenomena are revealed as follows: (1) interfacial modification on the buried interface inverts the negative component in biphasic TPV to a positive component, which prevents the leakage current channel in the conventional OSC structure; and (2) the solvent chosen transforms the positive component in biphasic TPV into a negative signal, which blocks the leakage current channel in the inverted OSC structure. Consequently, the study of TPV polarity provides the justification of the interaction at the buried interface. Besides, the decay of TPV is found to be bi-exponential, which can be used as a tool to estimate the degree of charge balance in OSCs.