Formation of silver iodide nanoparticles on silk fiber by means of ultrasonic irradiation

The growth of silver iodide nanoparticles on silk fiber was achieved by sequential dipping in an alternating bath of potassium iodide and silver nitrate under ultrasound irradiation. Some parameters such as effect of pH, concentration and numerous sequential dipping in growth of the nanocrystal have been studied. The samples were characterized with powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), ICP, TGA and solid state UV–vis spectroscopy.     

Synthesis of some new triamide derivatives via Ugi five-component reaction in aqueous solution

Triamide derivatives have been synthesized in good yields in a novel, one-pot, five-component, and efficient process by the reaction of Z-oxazolone, water, primary amines, aldehydes, isocyanides, in the presence of catalytic amount of KAl(SO₄)₂·12H₂O (alum) as a non-toxic, reusable, inexpensive, and easily available reagent via Ugi reaction in aqueous solution.     

Pulsed electron-electron double resonance (PELDOR) distance measurements in detergent micelles

Pulsed electron-electron double resonance (PELDOR) spectroscopy is a powerful tool for measuring nanometer distances in spin-labeled systems. A common approach is doubly covalent spin-labeling of a macromolecule and measurement of the inter-spin distance, or to use singly-labeled components of a system that forms aggregates or oligomers. This situation has been described as a spin-cluster. The PELDOR signal, however, does not only contain the desired dipolar coupling between the spin-labels of the molecule or cluster under study. In samples of finite concentration the dipolar coupling between the spin-labels of the randomly distributed molecules or spin-clusters also contributes significantly. In homogeneous frozen solutions or lipid vesicle membranes this second contribution can be considered to be an exponential or stretched exponential decay, respectively. In this study, we show that this assumption is not valid in detergent micelles. Spin-labeled fatty acids that are randomly partitioned into different detergent micelles give rise to PELDOR time traces which clearly deviate from stretched exponential decays. The obtained signals can be modeled quantitatively based on the size of the micelles, their aggregation number, the spin-label concentration and the degree of spin-labeling. As a main conclusion a PELDOR signal deviating from a stretched exponential decay does not necessarily prove the observation of specific distance information on the molecule or cluster. These results are important for the interpretation of PELDOR experiments on membrane proteins or lipophilic peptides solubilized in detergent micelles or small vesicles, which often do not show pronounced dipolar oscillations in their time traces.     

A recursive color image edge detection method using Green's function approach

In this paper, an extended version of image edge detector using Green's function approach is proposed for detection of edges in the color vector space field. In the proposed method, the relationship between the Red, Green and Blue components is considered to design a differential operator for detection of edges in color images. By using the proposed operator, partial derivatives of all components of color image can simultaneously affect on the edge detection process. Therefore the proposed method can preserve the vector nature of color images during the edge processing stages. Also, the proposed method is compared both quantitatively and qualitatively with other color edge detectors. Experimental results show that the proposed method can efficiently preserve the edges even when the color images corrupted with different levels of noise.     

Continuous-wave mid-infrared frequency conversion in silicon nanowaveguides

We report the first demonstration of cw wavelength conversion from the telecommunications band to the mid-IR (MIR) region via four-wave mixing in silicon nanowaveguides. We measure a parametric bandwidth of 748 nm by converting a 1636 nm signal to produce a 2384 nm idler and show continuously tunable wavelength conversion from 1792 to 2116 nm. This report indicates that the advantages of silicon photonics may be leveraged to create devices for a large range of MIR applications that require cw operation.     

Markov Properties of Electrical Discharge Current Fluctuations in Plasma

Using the Markovian method, we study the stochastic nature of electrical discharge current fluctuations in the Helium plasma. Sinusoidal trends are extracted from the data set by the Fourier-Detrended Fluctuation analysis and consequently cleaned data is retrieved. We determine the Markov time scale of the detrended data set by using likelihood analysis. We also estimate the Kramers-Moyal’s coefficients of the discharge current fluctuations and derive the corresponding Fokker-Planck equation. In addition, the obtained Langevin equation enables us to reconstruct discharge time series with similar statistical properties compared with the observed in the experiment. We also provide an exact decomposition of temporal correlation function by using Kramers-Moyal’s coefficients. We show that for the stationary time series, the two point temporal correlation function has an exponential decaying behavior with a characteristic correlation time scale. Our results confirm that, there is no definite relation between correlation and Markov time scales. However both of them behave as monotonic increasing function of discharge current intensity. Finally to complete our analysis, the multifractal behavior of reconstructed time series using its Keramers-Moyal’s coefficients and original data set are investigated. Extended self similarity analysis demonstrates that fluctuations in our experimental setup deviates from Kolmogorov (K41) theory for fully developed turbulence regime.     

Geodesic motion in the neighbourhood of submanifolds embedded in warped product spaces

We study the classical geodesic motions of nonzero rest mass test particles and photons in (3 + 1 + n)- dimensional warped product spaces. An important feature of these spaces is that they allow a natural decoupling between the motions in the (3 + 1)-dimensional spacetime and those in the extra n dimensions. Using this decoupling and employing phase space analysis we investigate the conditions for confinement of particles and photons to the (3 + 1)- spacetime submanifold. In addition to providing information regarding the motion of photons, we also show that these motions are not constrained by the value of the extrinsic curvature. We obtain the general conditions for the confinement of geodesics in the case of pseudo-Riemannian manifolds as well as establishing the conditions for the stability of such confinement. These results also generalise a recent result of the authors concerning the embeddings of hypersurfaces with codimension one.     

Microwave-assisted green synthesis of 4,5-dihydro-1<Emphasis Type="Italic">H</Emphasis>-pyrazole-1-carbothioamides in water

Rapid, efficient, simple and green procedure for the synthesis of 4,5-dihydro-1H-pyrazole-1-carbothioamides via the multicomponent reaction of aryl aldehydes, acetophenones and thiosemicarbazide in water in the presence of tetrabutylammonium hydroxide under microwave irradiation is reported.     

Study on the Interaction of the CpG Alternating DNA with CdTe Quantum Dots

A novel sensitive method for detection of DNA methylation was developed with thioglycollic acid (TGA)-capped CdTe quantum dots (QDs) as fluorescence probes. Recognition of methylated DNA sites would be useful strategy due to the important roles of methylation in disease occurrence and developmental processes. DNA methylation occurs most often at cytosine-guanine sites (CpG dinucleotides) of gene promoters. The QDs significantly interacted with hybridized unmethylated and methylated DNA. The interaction of CpG rich methylated and unmethylated DNA hybrid with quantum dots as an optical probe has been investigated by fluorescence spectroscopy and electrophoresis assay. The fluorescence intensity of QDs was highly dependent to unmethylated and methylated DNA. Specific site of CpG islands of Adenomatous polyposis coli (APC), a well-studied tumor suppressor gene, was used as the detection target. Under optimum conditions, upon the addition of unmethylated dsDNA, the fluorescence intensity increased in linear range from 1.0?×?10^??10 to 1.0?×?10^??6M with detection limit of 6.2?×?10^??11 M and on the other hand, the intensity of QDs showed no changes with addition of methylated dsDNA. We also demonstrated that the unmethylated and methylated DNA and QDs complexes showed different mobility in electrophoresis assay. This easy and reliable method could distinguish between methylated and unmethylated DNA sequences.