Grafting of poly[1-(N,N-bis-carboxymethyl)amino-3-allylglycerol-co-dimethylacrylamide] copolymer onto siliceous support for preconcentration and determination of lead (II) in human plasma and environmental samples

A method is reported for surface grafting of polymer containing a functional monomer for metal chelating, poly[1-(N,N-bis-carboxymethyl)amino-3-allylglycerol-co-dimethylacrylamide] (poly(AGE/IDA-co-DMAA) onto silica modified by silylation with 3-mercaptopropyltrimethoxysilane. Monomer 1-(N,N-bis-carboxymethyl)amino-3-allylglycerol (AGE/IDA) was synthesized by reaction of allyl glycidyl ether with iminodiacetic acid. The resulting sorbent has been characterized using FT-IR, elemental analysis, thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), FT-Raman and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and evaluated for the preconcentration and determination of trace Pb(II) in human biological fluid and environmental water samples. The optimum pH value for sorption of the metal ion was 5.5. The sorption capacity of functionalized resin was 15.06 mg g⁻¹. The chelating sorbent can be reused for 15 cycles of sorption–desorption without any significant change in sorption capacity. A recovery of 96.2% was obtained for the metal ion with 0.5 M nitric acid as eluting agent. The profile of lead uptake by the sorbent reflects good accessibility of the chelating sites in the poly(AGE/IDA-co-DMAA)-grafted silica gel. Scatchard analysis revealed that the homogeneous binding sites were formed in the polymers. The equilibrium adsorption data of Pb(II) by modified resin were analyzed by Langmuir, Freundlich, Temkin and Redlich–Peterson models. On the basis of equilibrium adsorption data the Langmuir, Freundlich and Temkin constants were determined as 0.70, 1.35 and 2.7, respectively at pH 5.5 and 20 °C. Isotherms have also been used to obtain the thermodynamic parameters such as free energy, enthalpy and entropy of adsorption.     

Composite polymer particles with stimuli-responsive surface properties and specific activity of adsorbed/released trypsin

Micron-sized monodispersed stimuli-responsive polys’ (PS)/poly(2-dimethylaminoethyl methacrylate-N-isopropyl acrylamide-ethylene glycol dimethacrylate) [P(DM-NIPAM-EGDM)] composite polymer particles were prepared by seeded copolymerisation of DM, NIPAM and EGDM with PS seed particles. Adsorption behaviour of trypsin suggested that composite particles surface has both temperature- and pH-responsive swelling–deswelling characteristics. The performance of composite polymer particles as a carrier for biomolecules in adsorption/release experiments was evaluated by measuring the specific activities of adsorbed trypsin as a function of temperature and pH.     

INAA of Zr,La, Ce and Nd in geological samples in the presence of different uranium concentratios

Rock samples which contain relatively high concentrations of uranium may create problems of interference produced by fission products, when instrumental neutron activation analysis is used. The isotopes⁹⁵Zr,¹⁴⁰La,¹⁴¹Ce, 143Ce and 147Nd, which are commonly used in the neutron activation analysis of the corresponding elements, are also produced as fission products of²³⁵U. For each of these radioisotopes, a contribution factor is calculated theoretically and meaured experimentally using geological samples with different uranium contents.     

Synthesis,chiral resolution and optical properties of amphiphilic oxa[9]helicene derivatives

A new class of amphiphilic oxa[9]helicene derivatives were synthesized in excellent-to-fair yields, and successfully characterized by different analytical techniques (e.g., FT-IR, ¹H and ¹³C NMR, and HRMS). The compounds were enantiomerically separated by chiral HPLC and the absolute configurations of the enantiomers were confirmed by circular dichroism spectroscopy. Other optical properties (e.g., UV, photoluminescence, specific optical rotation and molecular optical rotation) of the newly synthesized compounds were also examined.     

Nonequilibrium Keldysh formalism for interacting leads—Application to quantum dot transport driven by spin bias

The conductance through a mesoscopic system of interacting electrons coupled to two adjacent leads is conventionally derived via the Keldysh nonequilibrium Green’s function technique, in the limit of noninteracting leads [Y. Meir, N.S. Wingreen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 68 (1992) 2512]. We extend the standard formalism to cater for a quantum dot system with Coulombic interactions between the quantum dot and the leads. The general current expression is obtained by considering the equation of motion of the time-ordered Green’s function of the system. The nonequilibrium effects of the interacting leads are then incorporated by determining the contour-ordered Green’s function over the Keldysh loop and applying Langreth’s theorem. The dot–lead interactions significantly increase the height of the Kondo peaks in density of states of the quantum dot. This translates into two Kondo peaks in the spin differential conductance when the magnitude of the spin bias equals that of the Zeeman splitting. There also exists a plateau in the charge differential conductance due to the combined effect of spin bias and the Zeeman splitting. The low-bias conductance plateau with sharp edges is also a characteristic of the Kondo effect. The conductance plateau disappears for the case of asymmetric dot–lead interaction.     

Tension spline solution of nonlinear sine-Gordon equation

The sine-Gordon equation plays an important role in modern physics. By using spline function approximation, two implicit finite difference schemes are developed for the numerical solution of one-dimensional sine-Gordon equation. Stability analysis of the method has been given. It has been shown that by choosing the parameters suitably, we can obtain two schemes of orders O(k²+k²h²+h²)\mathcal{O}(k^{2}+k^{2}h^{2}+h^{2}) and O(k²+k²h²+h⁴)\mathcal{O}(k^{2}+k^{2}h^{2}+h^{4}). At the end, some numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.     

Systems of nonlinear Volterra integro-differential equations

An efficient method based on operational Tau matrix is developed, to solve a type of system of nonlinear Volterra integro-differential equations (IDEs). The presented method is also modified for the problems with separable kernel. Error estimation of the new schemes are analyzed and discussed. The advantages of this approach and its modification is that, the solution can be expressed as a truncated Taylor series, and the error function at any stage can be estimated. Methods are applied on the four problems with separable kernel to show the applicability and efficiency of our schemes, specially for those problems at broad intervals.     

Viscous New Varying Modified Cosmic Chaplygin Gas with Cosmological Constant in Non-flat Universe

In this paper we study new varying modified cosmic Chaplygin gas which has viscosity in presence of cosmological constant and space curvature. By using well-known forms of scale factor in Friedmann equation we obtain behavior of dark energy density numerically. We use observational data to fix solution and discuss about stability of our system.     

Monopole and topological electron dynamics in adiabatic spintronic and graphene systems

A unified theoretical treatment is presented to describe the physics of electron dynamics in semiconductor and graphene systems. Electron spin's fast alignment with the Zeeman magnetic field (physical or effective) is treated as a form of adiabatic spin evolution which necessarily generates a monopole in magnetic space. One could transform this monopole into the physical and intuitive topological magnetic fields in the useful momentum (K) or real spaces (R). The physics of electron dynamics related to spin Hall, torque, oscillations and other technologically useful spinor effects can be inferred from the topological magnetic fields in spintronic, graphene and other SU(2) systems.     

Study of Hydrogen Adsorption on Pt/WO3-ZrO2 through Pt Sites

The rate determining step and the energy barrier involved in hydrogen adsorption on Pt/WO_3- ZrO_2 were studied based on the assumption that the hydrogen adsorption occurs only through Pt sites. The rate of hydrogen adsorption on Pt/WO_3-ZrO_2 was measured in the adsorption temperature range of 323-573 K and an initial hydrogen pressure of 50 Torr.The rates of hydrogen uptake were very high for the initial few minutes and the adsorption continued for more than 5 h below 523 K.The hydrogen uptake far exceeded the H/Pt ratio of unity for all adsorption temperatures,indicating that the adsorption of hydrogen involved the dissociative adsorption of hydrogen on Pt sites to form hydrogen atoms,the spillover of hydrogen atoms onto the surface of the WO_3-ZrO2 catalyst,the diffusion of spiltover hydrogen atom over the surface of the WO_3-ZrO_2 catalyst,and the formation of protonic acid site originated from hydrogen atom by releasing an electron in which the electron may react with a second hydrogen atom to form a hydride near the Lewis acid site.The rate determining step was the spillover with the activation energy of 12.3 kJ/mol.The rate of hydrogen adsorption cannot be expressed by the rate equation based on the assumption that the rate determining step is the surface diffusion.The activity of Pt/WO_3-ZrO_2 was examined on n-heptane isomerization in which the increase of hydrogen partial pressure provided positive-effect on the conversion of n-heptane and negative-effect on the selectivity towards iso-heptane.