In-situ Raman spectroscopy used to study and control the initial growth phase of microcrystalline absorber layers for thin-film silicon solar cells

The continuous deposition of microcrystalline silicon has been monitored with in-situ Raman spectroscopy. The process and measurement settings were chosen such that one spectrum was taken during approximately 9 nm of layer growth. This allows observing the crystallinity in the initial growth phase of microcrystalline silicon absorber layers. The influence of different p-doped seed layers has been studied. Under constant deposition conditions, an initial decrease in crystallinity was observed over the first tens of nanometers. By profiling the process gas flows during the initial phase it was possible to reduce the amount of amorphous material that was detected during the initial phase of deposition.     

On the largest prime factor of numerators of Bernoulli numbers

We prove that for almost all $n$, the numerator of the Bernoulli number $B_{2n}$ is divisible by a large prime.     

A performance analysis of channel fragmentation in dynamic spectrum access systems

Dynamic Spectrum Access systems offer temporarily available spectrum to opportunistic users capable of spreading transmissions over a number of non-contiguous subchannels. Such methods can be highly beneficial in terms of spectrum utilization, but excessive fragmentation degrades performance and hence off-sets the benefits. To get some insight into acceptable levels of fragmentation, we present experimental and analytical results derived from a mathematical model. According to the model, a system operates at capacity serving requests for bandwidth by assigning a collection of one or more gaps of unused bandwidth to each request as bandwidth becomes available. Our main result is a proof that, even if fragments can be arbitrarily small, the system remains stable in the sense that the average total number of fragments remains bounded. Within the class of dynamic fragmentation models, including models of dynamic storage allocation that have been around for many decades, this result appears to be the first of its kind. In addition, we provide extensive experimental results that describe behavior, at times unexpected, of fragmentation as parameter values are varied. Different scanning rules for searching gaps of available spectrum, all covered by the above stability result, are also studied. Our model applies to dynamic linked-list storage allocation, and provides a novel analysis in that domain. We prove that, interestingly, a version of the 50?% rule of the classical, non-fragmented allocation model holds for the new model as well. Overall, the paper provides insights into the behavior of practical fragmentation algorithms.     

Two-Component Two-Compressible Flow in a Porous Medium

We prove existence of solutions of a two-compressible (liquid and gas) phase flow model in porous media with two components (water and hydrogen). This model is obtained by writing the mass conservation for each component in each phase. We suppose that the mass exchange between dissolved hydrogen and hydrogen in the gas phase is supposed finite. This mass exchange is modeled by a source term on each mass conservation equations.     

On the number of nonzero digits of the partition function

Let p(n) be the function that counts the number of partitions of n. Let b ≥ 2 be a fixed positive integer. In this paper, we show that for almost all n the sum of the digits of p(n) in base b is at least log n/(7log log n). Our proof uses the first term of Rademacher’s formula for p(n).     

Diphoton production at hadron colliders: a fully differential QCD calculation at next-to-next-to-leading order

We consider direct diphoton production in hadron collisions, and we compute the next-to-next-to-leading order QCD radiative corrections at the fully differential level. Our calculation uses the q(T) subtraction formalism, and it is implemented in a parton-level Monte Carlo program. The program allows the user to apply arbitrary kinematical cuts on the final-state photons and the associated jet activity and to compute the corresponding distributions in the form of bin histograms. We present selected numerical results related to Higgs boson searches at the LHC and corresponding results at the Tevatron.     

Ultrafast photovoltaic response in ferroelectric nanolayers

We show that light drives large-amplitude structural changes in thin films of the prototypical ferroelectric PbTiO3 via direct coupling to its intrinsic photovoltaic response. Using time-resolved x-ray scattering to visualize atomic displacements on femtosecond time scales, photoinduced changes in the unit-cell tetragonality are observed. These are driven by the motion of photogenerated free charges within the ferroelectric and can be simply explained by a model including both shift and screening currents, associated with the displacement of electrons first antiparallel to and then parallel to the ferroelectric polarization direction.     

Island of stability for consistent deformations of Einstein's gravity

We construct deformations of general relativity that are consistent and phenomenologically viable, since they respect, in particular, cosmological backgrounds. These deformations have unique symmetries in accordance with their Minkowski cousins (Fierz-Pauli theory for massive gravitons) and incorporate a background curvature induced self-stabilizing mechanism. Self-stabilization is essential in order to guarantee hyperbolic evolution in and unitarity of the covariantized theory, as well as the deformation's uniqueness. We show that the deformation's parameter space contains islands of absolute stability that are persistent through the entire cosmic evolution.