Alkaline oxygen evolution: exploring synergy between fcc and hcp cobalt nanoparticles entrapped in N-doped graphene

Herein, we report a Mott-Schottky catalyst by entrapping cobalt nanoparticles inside the N-doped graphene shell (Co@NC). The Co@NC delivered excellent oxygen evolution activity with an overpotential of merely 248 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm^–2 with promising long-term stability. The importance of Co encapsulated in NC has further been demonstrated by synthesizing Co nanoparticles without NC shell. The synergy between the hexagonal close-packed (hcp) and face-centered cubic (fcc) Co plays a major role to improve the OER activity, whereas the NC shell optimizes the electronic structure, improves the electron conductivity, and offers a large number of active sites in Co@NC. The density functional theory calculations have revealed that the hcp Co has a dominant role in the surface reaction of electrocatalytic oxygen evolution, whereas the fcc phase induces the built-in electric field at the interfaces with N-doped graphene to accelerate the H⁺ ion transport.     

Packing properties of cubic square-free monomial ideals

Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics - The symbolic powers, in general, are not equal to the ordinary powers. Therefore, one interesting question here is for what classes of ideals ordinary and...     

Radial and angular correlation in heliumlike ions

In the framework of nonrelativistic variational formalism a new type of basis set is proposed, to estimate separately the effect of radial and angular correlations on the ground‐state energy for helium isoelectronic sequence H^? to Ar¹⁶⁺. Effect of radial correlation is incorporated by using multiexponential functions arising from product basis sets suitably formed out of Slater‐type one‐particle orbitals. The angular correlation can be switched on by incorporating an expansion in terms of basis involving interparticle coordinates. With a set of six‐term Slater‐type one‐particle basis and five‐term interparticle expansion, the ground‐state energy of helium is estimated as ?2.9037236 (a.u.) compared with the multiterm variational estimates ?2.9037244 (a.u.) due to Pekeris and Thakkar and Smith and Drake. Matrix elements of different operators in the ground state have been calculated and found to be in good agreement with available accurate results. © 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Quantum Chem, 2003     

Measurement of storage time, estimation of ion number and study of absorption line profile in a Paul trap

Europium (Eu⁺) ions were confined in a Paul trap and detected by non-destructive method. Storage time of Eu⁺ ions achieved in vacuum was improved by orders of magnitude employing buffer gas cooling. The experimentally detected signal was fitted to the ion response signal and the total number of ions trapped was estimated. It is found that the peak signal amplitude as well as the product of FWHM and the peak signal amplitude is proportional to the total number of trapped ions. The trapped ion secular frequency was swept at different rates and its effect on the absorption line profile was studied both experimentally and theoretically.     

Working group report: Collider Physics

This is summary of the activities of the working group on collider physics in the IXth Workshop on High Energy Physics Phenomenology (WHEPP-9) held at the Institute of Physics, Bhubaneswar, India in January 2006. Some of the work subsequently done on these problems by the subgroups formed during the workshop is included in this report.     

On solving energy-dependent partitioned eigenvalue problem by genetic algorithm: The case of real symmetric Hamiltonian matrices

An energy-dependent partitioning scheme is explored for extracting a small number of eigenvalues of a real symmetric matrix with the help of genetic algorithm. The proposed method is tested with matrices of different sizes (30 × 30 to 1000 × 1000). Comparison is made with Löwdin’s strategy for solving the problem. The relative advantages and disadvantages of the GA-based method are analyzed     

Are the proposed cosmic H particles psionlike in Nature?

Summary The hints to explain the unusual type of cosmic cluster events (called generally the ?exotic? events) in ultrahigh-energy nuclear collisions in terms of proposed H particles have, to date, been neither substantiated nor concretised. We assort here some crucial aspects and assemble a few supportive evidences to favour our idea that the proposed H particles might be viewed as cosmic psionlike particles.     

Spectroscopic investigation of the Dergaon meteorite with reference to 10 μm and 20 μm bands

Analysis of a part of the meteorite which fell at Dergaon (India) on March 2, 16.40 local time (2001) is presented with the help of FTIR, absorption and atomic spectra. The FTIR spectrum exhibits prominent absorption bands in the region 800–1100 cm⁻¹, originating from the valence vibration of SiO⁴, a basic component of the silicate lattice.     

Flicker noise in degenerately doped Si single crystals near the metal-insulator transition

In this paper we report some of the important results of experimental investigations of the flicker noise near the metal-insulator (MI) transition in doped silicon single crystals. This is the first comprehensive work to study low-frequency noise in heavily doped Si over an extensive temperature range (2 K<T<500 K). The measurements of conductance fluctuations (flicker noise) were carried out in the frequency range 10⁻²<f<4 × 10¹ Hz in single crystalline Si across the MI transition by doping with phosphorous and boron. The magnitude of noise in heavily doped Si is much larger than that seen in lightly doped Si over the whole temperature range. The extensive temperature range covered allowed us to detect two distinct noise mechanisms. At low temperatures (T<100 K) universal conductance fluctuations (UCF) dominate and the spectral dependence of the noise is determined by dephasing the electron from defects with two-levels (TLS). At higher temperatures (T>200 K) the noise arises from activated defect dynamics. As the MI transition is approached, the 1/f spectral power, typical of the metallic regime, gets modified by the presence of discrete Lorentzians which arise from generation-recombination process which is the characteristic of a semiconductor.