A New Voltammetric Approach for Electrochemical Determination of Lamotrigine in Pharmaceutical Samples

A new linear sweep voltammetric method for quantitative lamotrigine (LMT) determination based on an electrochemically pre-treated pencil graphite electrode (PGE*) is presented. Response characteristics of the PGE* toward the mentioned compound were investigated by cyclic voltammetry and linear sweep voltammetry. The quantitative determination of LMT revealed a wide linear range of 2.5 ⋅ 10⁻⁵–1.0 ⋅ 10⁻³ M with a detection limit of 1.94 ⋅ 10⁻⁵ M. The method was used successfully for LMT determination in a pharmaceutical formulation.     

Enumeration of Lozenge Tilings of Hexagons with Cut-Off Corners

Motivated by the enumeration of a class of plane partitions studied by Proctor and by considerations about symmetry classes of plane partitions, we consider the problem of enumerating lozenge tilings of a hexagon with “maximal staircases” removed from some of its vertices. The case of one vertex corresponds to Proctor's problem. For two vertices there are several cases to consider, and most of them lead to nice enumeration formulas. For three or more vertices there do not seem to exist nice product formulas in general, but in one special situation a lot of factorization occurs, and we pose the problem of finding a formula for the number of tilings in this case.     

Voltammetric determination of dihydroxybenzene isomers using a disposable pencil graphite electrode modified with cobalt-phthalocyanine

Microchimica Acta - A novel voltammetric assay for the simultaneous determination of hydroquinone (HQ), catechol (CC) and resorcinol (RS) by using an electrochemically treated pencil graphite...     

Perfect Matchings of Cellular Graphs

We introduce a family of graphs, called cellular, and consider the problem of enumerating their perfect matchings. We prove that the number of perfect matchings of a cellular graph equals a power of 2 times the number of perfect matchings of a certain subgraph, called the core of the graph. This yields, as a special case, a new proof of the fact that the Aztec diamond graph of order n introduced by Elkies, Kuperberg, Larsen and Propp has exactly 2 ^n(n+1)/2 perfect matchings. As further applications, we prove a recurrence for the number of perfect matchings of certain cellular graphs indexed by partitions, and we enumerate the perfect matchings of two other families of graphs called Aztec rectangles and Aztec triangles.     

FI-on line photochemical reaction for direct chemiluminescence determination of photodegradated chloramphenicol

A new, simple, clean and selective flow injection strategy based on the tandem photochemical reaction-chemiluminescence detection was applied to the determination of chloramphenicol. The determination is based on the on-line photodegradation of the drug in a glycine buffer at pH 8.8 by using a photoreactor consisting of 697 cmx0.5 mm PTFE tubing helically coiled around an 8 W low-pressure mercury lamp. Photodegradated chloramphenicol is detected by direct chemiluminescence of resulting photo-fragments and their subsequent reaction with potassium permanganate in sulfuric acid medium as oxidant. The method allows the chemiluminescence determination of compounds which do not exhibit native chemiluminescence. The calibration graph was linear up to 14 mug ml(-1) chloramphenicol, the limit of detection was 30 ng ml(-1), the relative standard deviation was 2.4% for 7 mug ml(-1) of the drug and the sample throughput was 60 h(-1). Taking into account the importance of the medium of photodegradation on the mechanism of photodegradation a comparative study in terms of selective was performed for different chemical media employed in the procedure of photodegradation. The proposed method was applied to the determination of chloramphenicol in commercially available pharmaceutical formulations.     

A remark on sets having the Steinhaus property

A point set satisfies the Steinhaus property if no matter how it is placed on a plane, it covers exactly one integer lattice point. Whether or not such a set exists, is an open problem. Beck has proved [1] that any bounded set satisfying the Steinhaus property is not Lebesgue measurable. We show that any such set (bounded or not) must have empty interior. As a corollary, we deduce that closed sets do not have the Steinhaus property, fact noted by Sierpinski [3] under the additional assumption of boundedness.     

The Interaction of Collinear Gaps of Arbitrary Charge in a Two Dimensional Dimer System

The correlation of gaps in dimer systems was introduced by Fisher and Stephenson (Phys Rev 132:1411–1431, 1963), who looked at the interaction of two monomers generated by the rigid exclusion of dimers on the closely packed square lattice. In previous work we considered the analogous problem on the hexagonal lattice, and we extended the set-up to include the correlation of any finite number of monomer clusters. For fairly general classes of monomer clusters we proved that the asymptotics of their correlation is given, for large separations between the clusters, by a multiplicative version of Coulomb’s law for 2D electrostatics. However, our previous results required that the monomer clusters consist (with possibly one exception) of an even number of monomers. In this paper we determine the asymptotics of general defect clusters along a lattice diagonal in the square lattice (involving an arbitrary, even or odd number of monomers), and find that it is given by the same Coulomb law. We also obtain a conceptual interpretation for the multiplicative constant as the product of the correlations of the individual clusters.