Formation of Titanium Carbide from Ilmenite Concentrates in a Thermal Plasma Reactor

Plasma Chemistry and Plasma Processing - Formation of fine titanium carbide powder, using ilmenite concentrate and methane as feed, in a thermal plasma reactor was investigated. The plasma torch...     

Mesomorphism of a tetrahedral zinc complex

Thermotropic smectic phases have been observed for the first time in a zinc coordination complex with tetrahedral geometry; this complex, which contains the pyrazole dimer bis[3,5-bis(p-decyloxyphenyl)pyrazolyl]ethane as the ligand, exhibits fluorescence.     

Aryl palladium carbene complexes and carbene-aryl coupling reactions

Transmetalation of an aminocarbene moiety from [W(CO)5{C(NEt2)R}] to palladium leads to isolable monoaminocarbene palladium aryl complexes [{Pd(mu-Br)Pf[C(NEt2)R]}2] (R = Me, Ph; Pf = C6F5). When [W(CO)5{C(OMe)R}] is used, the corresponding palladium carbenes cannot be isolated since these putative, more electrophilic carbenes undergo a fast migratory insertion process to give alkyl palladium complexes. These complexes could be stabilized in the eta3-allylic form for R = 2-phenylethenyl or in the less stable eta3-benzylic fashion for R = Ph. Hydrolysis products and a pentafluorophenylvinylic methyl ether (when R = Me) were also observed. The monoaminocarbenes slowly decompose through carbene-aryl coupling to produce the corresponding iminium salts and, depending on the reaction conditions, the corresponding hydrolysis products. The electrophilicity of the carbene carbon, which is mainly determined by the nature of the heteroatom group, controls the ease of evolution by carbene-aryl coupling. Accordingly, no carbene-aryl coupling was observed for a diaminocarbene palladium aryl complex.     

Single molecular conductance of tolanes: experimental and theoretical study on the junction evolution dependent on the anchoring group

Employing a scanning tunneling microscopy based beak junction technique and mechanically controlled break junction experiments, we investigated tolane (diphenylacetylene)-type single molecular junctions having four different anchoring groups (SH, pyridyl (PY), NH(2), and CN) at a solid/liquid interface. The combination of current-distance and current-voltage measurements and their quantitative statistical analysis revealed the following sequence for junction formation probability and stability: PY > SH > NH(2) > CN. For all single molecular junctions investigated, we observed the evolution through multiple junction configurations, with a particularly well-defined binding geometry for PY. The comparison of density functional theory type model calculations and molecular dynamics simulations with the experimental results revealed structure and mechanistic details of the evolution of the different types of (single) molecular junctions upon stretching quantitatively.     

Optimization of Antenna Current Feeding for the Alfvén Eigenmodes Active Diagnostic System of JET

The possibility of exploring proper phasing of the feeding currents in the existing antenna of the Alfvén Eigenmodes Active Diagnostic system of JET, to excite pure toroidal spectra of Toroidal Alfvén Eigenmodes, is numerically investigated. Special attention is given to the actual perturbed fields excited in the plasma, which are calculated self-consistently using the antenna version of the CASTOR code. It is found that due to the close spacing of the JET antenna modules and quasi degeneracy of modes with medium to high values of the toroidal mode number n, although a proper choice of the phasing of the feeding currents of the antenna modules indeed leads to an increase of the perturbed fields of the selected mode, modes with nearby values of n are also excited with large amplitudes, so that a scheme to proper select the detected modes remains necessary. A scheme using different antenna position distribution is proposed to achieve successful optimization.     

Characterization of Phenolic Compounds Contained in Bio-Oil Stemming from Agricultural Biomass Wastes

JPC – Journal of Planar Chromatography – Modern TLC - Bio-oil is produced by biomass pyrolysis. It contains hundreds of chemical compounds including alkanes, aromatic hydrocarbons,...     

Determination of transition probabilities by laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy with curve-of-growth measurements

A method for the measurement of transition probabilities using laser-induced plasmas as spectroscopic sources is presented. To check its validity, the method is applied to 19 Ni II lines, most of them with known A_ki values. The method is based on the measurement of curves of growth using samples with varying concentrations of the element of interest (here, nickel-copper alloys with nickel contents in the range 0.11-27 at%). The plasma is characterized by a reduced set of parameters, obtained by usual techniques (Boltzmann plot and Stark shift) combined with the curve-of-growth methodology. The transition probabilities are determined by fitting experimental curves of growth to calculations based on the plasma parameters. The use of curves of growth allows eliminating the systematic error due to the self-absorption in the measurement of transition probabilities, and is applicable to intense as well as very weak lines.     

Matter induced bimetric actions for gravity

The gravitational effective average action is studied in a bimetric truncation with a nontrivial background field dependence, and its renormalization group flow due to a scalar multiplet coupled to gravity is derived. Neglecting the metric contributions to the corresponding beta functions, the analysis of its fixed points reveals that, even on the new enlarged theory space which includes bimetric action functionals, the theory is asymptotically safe in the large N expansion.