Hydrogen activation by 2-boryl-N,N-dialkylanilines: a revision of Piers' ansa-aminoborane

Two 2-[bis(pentafluorophenyl)boryl]-N,N-dialkylanilines reported here exemplify a new class of intramolecular frustrated B/N Lewis pairs. A structure closely related to this class structure was synthesized in 2003 by Piers et al. but was unable to activate H(2). The new aminoboranes can activate hydrogen at near ambient conditions; besides, one of them can hydrogenate imines and enamines in a catalytic fashion demonstrating the validity of the original Piers' approach to hydrogen activation with ansa-aminoboranes.     

Cascade linear phase recursive half-band filters implement the most efficient digital down converter

The digital down converter (DDC) is a fundamental component in modern DSP based receivers. The basic architecture is the DSP implementation of the Edwin Armstrong heterodyne circuit. It is formed by three processes, a quadrature heterodyne, a pair of low-pass filters, and an M-to-1 down sampler. The index M is the ratio of input to output bandwidth of the filtering process. When M is large, the filtering is often performed in two sub-filters: a cascade integrator comb (CIC) filter that performs most of the down sampling followed by a pair of half-band filters that perform spectral correction, some final bandwidth reduction, and the remainder of the down-sampling. The attraction of the CIC filter is that it performs the filtering without multiplies. In this paper we present two alternate filter structures that offer significant computational advantages over the conventional CIC based DDC. These architectures offer the minimum power implementation of a DDC and likely will find great value in battery operated radio receivers.     

Quantitative characterization of critical nanoclusters nucleated on large single molecules

First order phase transitions involve nucleation, formation of nanoscale regions of a new phase within a metastable parent phase. Using the heterogeneous nucleation theorem we show how clusters formed by nucleation on single molecules evolve from the gas phase and determine the critical size beyond which condensation starts to form aerosol particles. Our experiments reveal the activation of molecules into droplets to happen via formation of critical clusters substantially larger than the seed molecule. The nanosized critical clusters were found to be well predicted by the Kelvin-Thomson relation pointing directly to the key step in the phase transition.     

BRST Quantization of Unimodular Gravity

We study the quantization of two versions of unimodular gravity, namely fully diffeomorphism-invariant unimodular gravity and unimodular gravity with fixed metric determinant, utilizing standard path integral approach. We derive the BRST symmetry of effective actions corresponding to several relevant gauge conditions. We observe that for some gauge conditions, the restricted gauge structure may complicate the formulation and effective actions, in particular, if the chosen gauge conditions involve the canonical momentum conjugate to the induced metric on the spatial hypersurface. The BRST symmetry is extended further to the finite field-dependent BRST transformation, in order to establish the mapping between different gauge conditions in each of the two versions of unimodular gravity.     

Quantitative liver iron measurement by magnetic resonance imaging: in vitro and in vivo assessment of the liver to muscle signal intensity and the R2* methods

Purpose

To evaluate the liver-to-muscle signal intensity and R2* methods to gain a transferable, clinical application for liver iron measurement.

Materials and Methods

Sixteen liver phantoms and 33 human subjects were examined using three 1.5-T MRI scanners from two different vendors. Phantom-to-muscle and liver-to-muscle signal intensity ratios were analyzed to determine MRI estimated phantom and hepatic iron concentration (M-PIC and M-HIC, respectively). R2* was calculated for the phantoms and the liver of human subjects. Seven patients' biochemical hepatic iron concentration was obtained.

Results

M-PIC and R2* results of three scanners correlated linearly to phantom iron concentrations (r=0.984 to 0.989 and r=0.972 to 0.981, respectively), and no significant difference between the scanners was found (P=.482 and P=.846, respectively) in vitro. The patients' R2* correlated linearly to M-HIC of the standard scanner (r=0.981). M-HIC values did not differ from those obtained from the biopsy specimens (P=.230). The difference in M-HIC was significant, but the difference in R2* was not significant between the scanners (P<.0001 and P=.505, respectively) in vivo.

Conclusion

Both methods, M-HIC and R2*, are reliable iron concentration indicators with linear dependence on iron concentration in vivo and in vitro. The R2* method was found to be comparable among different scanners. Transferability testing is needed for the use of the methods at various scanners.     

Bis(alkylphenylaminopyridinato) titanium dichlorides as ethylene polymerization catalysts

Four titanium complexes derived from 2-(2-ethylanilino)-, 2-(3,5-dimethylanilino)pyridine, 2-(4-n-butylanilino)- and 2-(2-t-butylanilino)pyridine were synthesized and characterized by spectroscopic methods. These complexes were used to catalyze the polymerization of ethylene in the presence of MAO as cocatalyst. The effect of the complex structures on the polymerization behavior was studied. All the alkylphenylaminopyridinato titanium complexes used in this study yielded higher molar masses than the unsubstituted bis(phenylaminopyridinato) titanium dichloride complex. Correspondingly, activities were lower and molar mass distributions were broader than those in the case of the unsubstituted bis(phenylaminopyridinato) titanium catalyst. The fluxional behavior of alkylphenylaminopyridinato titanium catalysts is probably the reason for the broad molar mass distributions. This might be due to the electron-donating effect from the alkyl substituent because the alkyl substituent enhances the active site isomerization rate.     

Formation and structural characterization of novel polynuclear palladium selenolato complexes [Pd3Se(SePh)3(PPh3)3]Cl and [Pd6Cl2Se4(SePh)2(PPh3)6]

In addition to well-known dinuclear phenylselenolato palladium complexes, the reaction of [PdCl₂(PPh₃)₂] and NaSePh affords small amounts of novel trinuclear and hexanuclear complexes [Pd₃Se(SePh)₃(PPh₃)₃]Cl (1) and [Pd₆Cl₂Se₄(SePh)₂(PPh₃)₆] (2). Complex 1 is triclinic, P1?, a=13.6310(2), b=16.2596(2), c=16.9899(3) Å, α=83.1738(5), β=78.9882(5), γ=78.7635(5)°. Complex 2 is monoclinic, C2/c, a=25.7165(9), b=17.6426(8), c=27.9151(14) Å, β=110.513(2)°. There are no structural forerunners for 1, but the hexanuclear complex 2 is isostructural with [Pd₆Cl₂Te₄(TeR)₂(PPh₃)₆] (R=Ph, C₄H₃S) that have been observed as one of the products in the oxidative addition of R₂Te₂ to [Pd(PPh₃)₄]. Mononuclear palladium complexes may play a significant role as building blocks in the formation of the polynuclear complexes.     

Synthesis,spectroscopic, magnetic properties and MMX force field study of two imidazolate-bridged dinuclear copper(II) complexes

Two new imidazolate-bridged dinuclear Cu^II complexes, Na[Cu₂(L¹)₂(im)] and K[Cu₂(L²)₂(im)] (where H₂L¹=6-amino-1,3-dimethyl-5(2-carboxyphenyl)azouracil and H₂L²=1,3-dimethyl-5(2-carboxyphenyl)azobarbituric acid) have been prepared and characterized by magnetic susceptibility and spectroscopic measurements. Both compounds exhibit the expected antiferromagnetic behaviour with 2J=−54.8 and −30.4 cm⁻¹, respectively. Because of the lack of suitable crystals for single crystal X-ray analysis, we have calculated the lowest energy structures using a program based on the MMX force field. On the basis of the results, the magnitude of the magnetic interaction is discussed. TMC 2623     

Comparison between the electrical properties of atomic layer deposited thin ZrO2 films processed from cyclopentadienyl precursors

Electrical characterization of zirconium oxide (ZrO₂) based metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) structures has been carried out. ZrO₂ films have been atomic layer deposited (ALD) by using novel cyclopentadienyl-based precursors, which have recently revealed themselves as very adequate in terms of thermal stability and high permittivity of the dielectrics deposited. Our results demonstrate good quality of the films, especially when mixed alkylamido-cyclopentadienyl precursors are used on SiO₂/Si substrates. Conduction mechanisms in these MIS capacitors were studied, with moderately or highly-doped silicon used as substrate.     

Stable operation of a cw optical parametric oscillator near the signal-idler degeneracy

The frequency stability of a cw optical parametric oscillator (cw OPO) near the signal-idler degeneracy has been studied. The strong tendency of a near-degenerate OPO to mode hop has been suppressed by using a bulk Bragg grating as a spectral filter in the OPO cavity. An experimental demonstration of stable parametric oscillation in a single longitudinal mode of the OPO cavity is reported, together with the capability of tuning the signal-idler difference frequency from 1 to 4 THz. The OPO has potential use in cw terahertz generation.