Characterization of a Pd-Fe bimetallic model catalyst

Small bimetallic Pd-Fe particles supported on a well ordered alumina film grown on NiAl (1 1 0) were studied focusing on the geometric, electronic, adsorption, as well as magnetic properties. The morphology, growth mode and surface composition were investigated by combining scanning tunneling microscopy (STM), temperature-programmed desorption (TPD) and infrared spectroscopy (IRAS) using CO as a probe molecule. Information on the electronic properties of the bimetallic systems was obtained by means of X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). These measurements were amended by in situ ferromagnetic resonance spectroscopy to address the magnetic properties of the bimetallic particles. The subsequent deposition of the metals at 300 K varying the order of metal deposition resulted in two distinct bimetallic systems. Pd deposited on existing Fe particles forms a shell, however, FMR and XPS suggest that intermixing of Pd and Fe occurs to some extent. For the reverse order, a larger amount of Fe is required to coat Pd particles, due to the strong tendency of Pd to segregate to the surface of the particles.     

Facet degradation of high-power diode laser arrays

Micro-Raman facet temperatures of high-power diode lasers with different waveguide architectures are compared. For regular operation conditions, the thermal behavior of ‘unaged’ arrays emitting in the 808-nm wavelength region with different architectures is similar, however, with an increased load thermal behaviors differ significantly and exhibit failure events at facet temperatures typically between 150 and 450 °C. From various experiments, among them facet temperature measurements for ultrahigh-power operation as well as by preparative failure analytics, we provide evidence that in arrays the front facets are significantly affected by device operation and influence the failure behavior of the whole high-power diode laser also in cases when the device failure is accompanied by dislocation creation inside the device. Received: 3 October 1999 / Accepted: 9 November 1999 / Published online: 8 March 2000     

Track Extensions of Categories and Cohomology

We introduce the notion of n-fold track extensions of a category C by a natural system D and prove that such extensions represent classes in the cohomology of C with coefficients in D introduced by Baues–Wirsching. This generalizes a result of Huebschmann on the cohomology of groups.     

Smash Products for Secondary Homotopy Groups

We construct a smash product operation on secondary homotopy groups yielding the structure of a lax symmetric monoidal functor. Applications on cup-one products, Toda brackets and Whitehead products are considered. The second author was partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science under MEC-FEDER grants MTM2004-01865 and MTM2004-03629, the postdoctoral fellowship EX2004-0616, and a Juan de la Cierva research contract.     

Antiblocking systems and PD-sets

Since the permutation decoding algorithm is more efficient the smaller the size of the PD-set, it is important for the applications to find small PD-sets. A lower bound on the size of a PD-set is given by Gordon. There are examples for PD-sets, but up to now there is no method known to find PD-sets. The question arises whether the Gordon bound is sharp. To handle this problem we introduce the notion of antiblocking system and we show that there are examples where the Gordon bound is not sharp.