Thienyl directed polyaromatic C-C bond fusions: S-doped hexabenzocoronenes

With a view to combining the desirable electronic and photochemical properties of hexabenzocoronene (HBC) and the C-C bond forming capabilities of thiophenes, 1-(3-thienyl)-2,3,4,5,6-penta(4-tert-butyl-phenyl)benzene (1) was oxidised using FeCl(3). The resulting products, superaromatic thiophene (2) and its 5,5'-dimer (3), are S-HBC systems and provide a new pair of spectral comparators.     

Fluctuations and micro-heterogeneity in aqueous mixtures

The problem as to why water-water density correlations are systematically overestimated in computer simulation of aqueous mixtures is examined through an extensive molecular dynamics study of mixtures of the extended single point charge water model with a fully miscible weaker version of it, obtained by scaling down the site partial charges by a factor 2/3, thereby eliminating solute-solvent size differences. The study reveals that enhanced water correlations is a genuine physical effect, and are not an artifact of the simulations or the models, as previously suggested in the context of realistic aqueous mixtures. Rather, they correspond to the existence of strongly correlated water domains, for "weak-water" mole fraction x > 0.4, that modulate the spatial decay of the density correlations. These domains produce a prepeak in the structure factor, suggesting that simple aqueous mixture might behave just like micro-emulsions. The overestimated long range water correlations result from incorrect predictions of the asymptote of these correlations, which themselves arise from size limitations of the simulation box. However, by requiring consistency between thermodynamical and structural expressions of the concentration fluctuations, a method to predict the proper decay of the correlation function is obtained herein, inspired by the formal analogy with micro-emulsions. This study provides a new insight for the large values of the experimental Kirkwood-Buff integrals for many aqueous mixtures: these mixtures are in a Lifshitz-type regime, where concentration fluctuations compete with water domain formation.     

Nontrivial Solutions of p-Superlinear p-Laplacian Problems

We obtain nontrivial solutions for a class of p-Laplacian problems that are p-superlinear at infinity and nonresonant at zero. The proof is based on showing that the associated variational function has a (generalized) local linking near the origin and makes use of a new sequence of min-max eigenvalues of the p-Laplacian defined using the Yang index.     

Thin-layer hydrodynamic biamperometric end-point detection: application to the coulometric titration of arsenic(III) with bromine

A sandwich-type thin-layer cell has been applied to hydrodynamic biamperometric end-point detection in coulometric titrations. The detector cell, constructed from two pieces of teflon, has platinum indicator electrodes and is placed in a flow loop attached to the coulometric titration cell. The thin-layer cavity has a volume of 6.5 μl and a thickness of 51μm, which are obtained using teflon tape as a spacer. A peristaltic pump maintains a continual flow through the loop. The titration cell is a closed vessel completely filled with the solution to be titrated. Operational amplifier circuits control the potential difference applied across the two thin-layer electrodes, and to measure the current developed in the thin-layer cell. Noise arising from the pulsed nature of the flow is reduced by a factor of 25 by using an electronic filter. The titration of arsenic(III) with electrogenerated bromine was used to study the performance of the system. Concentrations from 24 ppb to 1.6 ppm can be determined with relative inaccuracies of +4 and +0.1%, respectively.     

Integral-equation theories and Mayer-sampling Monte Carlo: a tandem approach for computing virial coefficients of simple fluids

Mayer-sampling Monte Carlo (MSMC) has enabled computation of higher-order virial coefficients than previously possible for a variety of potential models, but it is not required for computation of the entire virial coefficient for models that are spherically symmetric: approximations that result from the hypernetted-chain (HNC) or Percus–Yevick (PY) integral-equation theories in conjunction with the compressibility equation (c) or virial equation (v) can be computed quickly by fast Fourier transforms. For the fourth and fifth virial coefficients of the Lennard–Jones potential (with parameters σ and ε), we demonstrate that the corrections to each of the four approximations (HNC(c), HNC(v), PY(c), and PY(v)) are faster to compute to a desired precision by MSMC than the full coefficient itself, with the exception of the PY(v) correction at fifth order, and that the optimal decomposition with regard to precision can be identified using a fraction of the steps required to obtain precise virial coefficients. At reduced temperatures kT/ε greater than 4, the PY(c) correction is fastest to compute by MSMC at both fourth and fifth orders. For lower temperatures, the HNC(v) decomposition is most efficient at fourth order, while the HNC(c) decomposition is most efficient at fifth order. These results are specific to the Lennard–Jones potential, but the method for determining the optimal decomposition is applicable to any spherically symmetric potential.