Determination of rare-earth elements and yttrium in silicate rocks by sequential inductively-coupled plasma emission spectrometry

An ICP—AES method for determination of rare-earth elements (REE) and yttrium at trace levels in silicate rocks is described. The method involves decomposition of the rock sample by heating with a mixture of hydrofluoric and perchloric acid, followed by precipitation of the REE and Y as oxalates, with calcium as carrier. The oxalate precipitate is ignited to the oxide, which is then dissolved in dilute nitric acid and the solution is used for ICP—AES measurements, with use of pure REE solutions as calibration standards. The method has been applied to the determination of REE in a number of standard reference materials and the results have been compared with the reported values. Three other silicate rock samples have also been analysed for REE and Y by this method.     

Effect of heating on dissociation of water vapor in high-frequency plasmas and formation of hydrogen peroxide in a cold trap downstream of the plasma

At low flow rates (0.7–2.8 mmol hr^–1) and long residence times (2.3–8.5 s) nearly 60% of the input water vapor was decomposed by a 13.56-MHz rf discharge. Downstream of the discharge a trap cooled by liquid nitrogen collected nearly constant yields of H₂O₂. The decomposition is representable by the equation 2H₂O=H₂O₂+H₂. The overall rate of decomposition was found to depend on the absorbed power density. Heating the rf plasma and its spatial afterglow from 25 to 600°C did not significantly change the percent decomposition of H₂O and the formation of H₂O₂. Above 600°C, however, a continuous decrease in H₂O₂ yield was observed with increasing temperature, and this was associated with the increasing formation of H₂O from the dissociated products such as highly excited OH radicals which otherwise produce the precursors of H₂O₂. The same heating effects were observed in the case of the spatial afterglow of a 2.45-GHz microwave cavity discharge in water vapor under essentially similar conditions. It appears that at the high temperatures the reaction OH+OHH₂O+O is favored over the reaction O+OHO₂+H. This limits the formation of O₂ and consequently decreases the H₂O₂ yield.     

Nonmonotonic composition dependence of vibrational phase relaxation rate in binary mixtures

We present here isothermal-isobaric N-P-T ensemble molecular dynamics simulations of vibrational phase relaxation in a model system to explore the unusual features arising due to concentration fluctuations which are absent in one component systems. The model studied consider strong attractive interaction between the dissimilar species to discourage phase separation. The model reproduces the experimentally observed nonmonotonic, nearly symmetric, composition dependence of the dephasing rate. In addition, several other experimentally observed features, such as the maximum of the frequency modulation correlation time tau(c) at mole fraction near 0.5 and the maximum rate enhancement by a factor of about 3 above the pure component value, are also reproduced. The product of mean square frequency modulation [] with tau(c) indicates that the present model is in the intermediate regime of inhomogeneous broadening. The nonmonotonic composition chi(A) dependence of the dephasing time tau(v) is found to be primarily due to the nonmonotonic chi dependence of tau(c), rather than due to a similar dependence in the amplitude of Delta omega(2)(0). The probability distribution of Delta omega shows a markedly non-Gaussian behavior at intermediate composition (chi(A) approximately =0.5). We have also calculated the composition dependence of the viscosity in order to explore the correlation between the composition dependence of viscosity eta(*) with that of tau(v) and tau(c). It is found that both the correlation time essentially follow the composition dependence of the viscosity. A mode coupling theory is presented to include the effects of composition fluctuations in binary mixture.     

Rapid self-assembly of core-shell organosilicon microcapsules within a microfluidic device

The preparation of hierarchically structured organosilicon microcapsules from commercially available starting materials is described. Using a microfluidic device, an emulsion of dichlorodiphenylsilane is formed in a continuous phase of aqueous glycerol. The silane droplets undergo hydrolysis, condensation, and crystallization within minutes to form self-assembled, core-shell microcapsules. The microparticles have been characterized with light and electron microscopy, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR), diffusion-ordered NMR spectroscopy (DOSY), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), and powder X-ray diffraction (XRD). The characterization data show that the microcapsule walls consist of amorphous, oligomeric poly(diphenylsiloxane) surrounded by a spiny layer of crystalline diphenylsilanediol. Glycerol is occluded within the wall material but is not covalently bound to the silicon components. Glycerol is a crucial element for producing low-dispersity microcapsules with well-ordered surface spines, as the use of methyl cellulose as viscomodifier yields amorphous surfaces.     

Entanglement in a valence-bond solid state

We study entanglement in a valence-bond solid state, which describes the ground state of an Affleck-Kennedy-Lieb-Tasaki quantum spin chain, consisting of bulk spin-1's and two spin-1/2's at the ends. We characterize entanglement between various subsystems of the ground state by mostly calculating the entropy of one of the subsystems; when appropriate, we evaluate concurrences as well. We show that the reduced density matrix of a continuous block of bulk spins is independent of the size of the chain and the location of the block relative to the ends. Moreover, we show that the entanglement of the block with the rest of the sites approaches a constant value exponentially fast, as the size of the block increases. We also calculate the entanglement of (i) any two bulk spins with the rest, and (ii) the end spin-1/2's (together and separately) with the rest of the ground state.     

A Different Approach to the Multiplicity Problem in Hadron Collisions

The models frequently applied to estimate the target mass in high energy interactions are used in conjunction with the HEISENBERG formula to obtain a semi empirical formulation for multiplicity. It is seen that the experimental data obtained by us and other authors on multiplicity fit into that formulation when considering the initial colliding systems to be either π - p or π - π. Also the values of Cos θ (θ being the emission angle of the secondaries in lab system) averaged over all emitted particles estimated from the above formulation are in good agreement with our experimental data.     

Physical fault tolerance of nanoelectronics

The error rate in complementary transistor circuits is suppressed exponentially in electron number, arising from an intrinsic physical implementation of fault-tolerant error correction. Contrariwise, explicit assembly of gates into the most efficient known fault-tolerant architecture is characterized by a subexponential suppression of error rate with electron number, and incurs significant overhead in wiring and complexity. We conclude that it is more efficient to prevent logical errors with physical fault tolerance than to correct logical errors with fault-tolerant architecture.     

Quantization dimension function and Gibbs measure associated with Moran set

In this paper we consider the Gibbs measure on the one-sided shift dynamical system and determine the quantization dimension function for the image measure supported on a Moran set. A relationship between the quantization dimension function and the temperature function of the thermodynamic formalism arising in multifractal analysis is also established.     

Preferential survival in models of complex ad hoc networks

There has been a rich interplay in recent years between (i) empirical investigations of real-world dynamic networks, (ii) analytical modeling of the microscopic mechanisms that drive the emergence of such networks, and (iii) harnessing of these mechanisms to either manipulate existing networks, or engineer new networks for specific tasks. We continue in this vein, and study the deletion phenomenon in the web by the following two different sets of websites (each comprising more than 150,000 pages) over a one-year period. Empirical data show that there is a significant deletion component in the underlying web networks, but the deletion process is not uniform. This motivates us to introduce a new mechanism of preferential survival (PS), where nodes are removed according to the degree-dependent deletion kernel, D(k)∝k^−α, with α≥0. We use the mean-field rate equation approach to study a general dynamic model driven by Preferential Attachment (PA), Double PA (DPA), and a tunable PS (i.e., with any α>0), where c nodes (c<1) are deleted per node added to the network, and verify our predictions via large-scale simulations. One of our results shows that, unlike in the case of uniform deletion (i.e., where α=0), the PS kernel when coupled with the standard PA mechanism, can lead to heavy-tailed power-law networks even in the presence of extreme turnover in the network. Moreover, a weak DPA mechanism, coupled with PS, can help to make the network even more heavy-tailed, especially in the limit when deletion and insertion rates are almost equal, and the overall network growth is minimal. The dynamics reported in this work can be used to design and engineer stable ad hoc networks and explain the stability of the power-law exponents observed in real-world networks.