Evolution of a hotspot in a thin BSCCO structured film

Two voltage jumps were found in the current–voltage characteristic of a thin superconducting film of Bi₂Sr₂CaCu₂O_x at temperature 58 K. The fluorescent thermal imaging technique revealed a localized heat dissipation (hotspot) nucleated at the current causing the second jump, and the hotspots’ temperature is close to the critical temperature of the superconducting film.     

Three dimensional imaging using secondary ion mass spectrometry and atomic force microscopy

With the breakthroughs in lateral resolution with regards to secondary ion mass spectroscopy in recent years, new areas of research with much promise have opened up to the scientific community. Even though the much improved lateral resolution of 50 nm can effectively deliver more accurate 3D-images, the traditional 3D reconstructions, consisting of compiling previously acquired successive secondary ion mass spectrometry images into a 3D-stack, do not represent the real localized chemical distribution of the sputtered volume. Based on samples initially analyzed on the Cameca NanoSIMS 50 instrument, this paper portrays the advantages of combining the topographical information from atomic force microscopy and the chemical information from secondary ion mass spectrometry. Taking account of the roughness evolution within the analyzed zone, 3D reconstructions become a lot more accurate and allow an easier interpretation of results. On the basis of an Al/Cu sample, a comparison between traditional 3D imaging and corrected 3D reconstructions is given and the advantages of the newly developed 3D imaging method are explained.     

Avoiding a giant component

Let e₁, e′₁; e₂, e′₂;…;e_i, e′_i;??? be a sequence of ordered pairs of edges chosen uniformly at random from the edge set of the complete graph K_n (i.e. we sample with replacement). This sequence is used to form a graph by choosing at stage i, i=1,…, one edge from e_i,e′_i to be an edge in the graph, where the choice at stage i is based only on the observation of the edges that have appeared by stage i. We show that these choices can be made so that whp the size of the largest component of the graph formed at stage 0.535n is polylogarithmic in n. This resolves a question of Achlioptas. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 19, 75–85, 2001