Accelerating electrochemistry with metal nanowires

Scalable, solution-phase syntheses of metal nanowires are enabling their increased use in electrochemical processes. This review highlights recent results demonstrating how metal nanowires can exhibit better durability and higher activity than traditional metal nanoparticle electrocatalysts on carbon supports. Metal nanowires can also form interconnected two-dimensional and three-dimensional (3D) networks that eliminate the need for a carbon support, thus eliminating the detrimental effects of carbon corrosion. Porous 3D networks of nanowires can be used as flow-through electrodes with the highest specific surface areas and mass transport coefficients obtained to date, enabling dramatic increases in the productivity of electrochemical reactions. Nanowire networks are also serving as 3D current collectors that improve the capacity of batteries. The tunable surface structure and dimensions of metal nanowires offer researchers a new opportunity to create electrodes that are tailored from the atomic scale to the microscale to improve electrochemical performance.     

Nonpropagation of scalar in the deformed Hořava–Lifshitz gravity

We study the propagation of a scalar, the trace of h_ij$h_{ij}$ in the deformed Ho?ava–Lifshitz gravity with coupling constant λ. It turns out that this scalar is not a propagating mode in the Minkowski spacetime background. In this work, we do not choose a gauge-fixing to identify the physical degrees of freedom and instead, make it possible by substituting the constraints into the quadratic Lagrangian.     

Method validation of a procedure for determination of <Superscript>210</Superscript>Po in water using DDTC solvent extraction and Sr resin

For the determination of ²¹⁰Po in water samples, two alternative procedures (a) DDTC solvent extraction and (b) extraction chromatography using Sr Resin were selected and then validated in terms of trueness, repeatability and reproducibility with a tap water spiked with a known amount of ²¹⁰Po. In this work the optimization conditions for the auto-deposition of Po for source preparation were also studied.     

Utility of reaction intermediate monitoring with photodissociation multi-stage (MS) time-of-flight mass spectrometry for mechanistic and structural studies: Phosphopeptides

In tandem mass spectra of phosphopeptides, intact sequence ions are often missing or appear weakly. Instead, dephosphorylated sequence ions appear prominently. In this work, we used photodissociation (PD) multi-stage (MSⁿ) time-of-flight mass spectrometry that can monitor reaction intermediates with lifetime as short as 100 ns to study the formation of dephosphorylated sequence ions such as y_n-H₃PO₄. y_n-H₃PO₄ was found to be formed mainly by H₃PO₄ loss from y_n. For doubly phosphorylated peptides, y_n seemed to lose H₃PO₄ stepwise and form y_n-H₃PO₄ and y_n-2H₃PO₄. Even when y_n was absent in PD-MS² spectrum, its m/z could be predicted from those of y_n-H₃PO₄ and/or y_n-2H₃PO₄. Complete sequence coverage was possible when the data from PD-MS² and PD-MS³ were combined, demonstrating the utility of transient ion detection by PD-MS³ for structure analysis.     

Conducting block copolymer for simple micro- to nanopatterns

To use conducting polymers as substitutes for metals and conventional semiconductors in device fabrication, a cost-effective process for the reproducible deposition of the conducting polymers is needed. In this letter, we report a simple solution casting method for the fabrication of micro- to nanopatterns using the conducting block copolymer, poly(thiophene-block-ethyleneoxide), which shows rectifying characteristics dependent on the pattern width.     

Influence of electric field intensity, ionic strength, and migration distance on the mobility and diffusion in DNA surface electrophoresis

In order to increase the separation rate of surface electrophoresis while preserving the resolution for large DNA chains, e.g., genomic DNA, the mobility and diffusion of Lambda DNA chains adsorbed on flat silicon substrate under an applied electric field, as a function of migration distance, ionic strength, and field intensity, were studied using laser fluorescence microscope. The mobility was found to follow a power law with the field intensity beyond a certain threshold. The detected DNA peak width was shown to be constant with migration distance, slightly smaller with stronger field intensity, but significantly decreased with higher ionic strength. The molecular dynamics simulation demonstrated that the peak width was strongly related with the conformation of DNA chains adsorbed onto surface. The results also implied that there was no diffusion of DNA during migration on surface. Therefore, the Nernst-Einstein relation is not valid in the surface electrophoresis and the separation rate could be improved without losing resolution by decreasing separation distance, increasing buffer concentration, and field intensity. The results indicate the fast separation of genomic DNA chains by surface electrophoresis is possible.     

Pixel resolution control in numerical reconstruction of digital holography

A new method for resolution control in numerical reconstruction of digital holography is proposed. The wave field on a tilted or vertical plane can be reconstructed without being subject to the minimum object-to-hologram distance requirement, and the pixel resolution can be easily controlled by adjusting the position of a transitional plane. The proposed method solves the problem of pixel resolution control for small object-to-hologram distances and is especially useful for multicolor, multiwavelength digital holography and metrological applications. Experimental results are presented to verify the idea.