A novel synthesis of vinyl esters from vinylversatate-10

Vinylversatate-10 (VV10)¹ has successfully been used to synthesise a large number of lower vinyl esters by transvinylation in presence of mercuric acetate and sulfuric acid. The synthesis of vinylhalo esters proceeds with more difficulty. It has been observed that neither Hg(OAc)₂ nor H₂SO₄ alone is capable of initiating the transvinylation. Furthermore, it has been found that a molar ratio 2:1 of VV10 to carboxylic acid is sufficient to drive the reaction to the right by continuous distillation of the vinyl ester formed, and as a result a high yield of vinyl ester is obtained. A mechanism for this reaction and for the formation of side products has been proposed.     

Instabilities in free-surface electroosmotic flows

Instability of a thin electrolyte film undergoing a direct current electroosmotic flow has been investigated. The film with a compliant electrolyte–air interface is flowing over a rigid charged substrate. Unlike previous studies, inclusion of the Maxwell stresses in the formulation shows the presence of a new finite wavenumber shear-flow mode of instability, alongside the more frequently observed long-wave interfacial mode. The shear mode is found to be the dominant mode of instability when the electrolyte–solid and electrolyte–air interfaces are of opposite charge or of same charge but have very large zeta-potential at the electrolyte–air interface. The conditions for mode-switch (interfacial to shear) and the direction of the travelling waves are discussed through stability diagrams. Interestingly, the analysis shows that when the interfaces are of nearly same zeta potential, the ‘free’ electrolyte–air interface behaves more like a ‘stationary’ wall because of the ion transport in the reverse direction of the flow.     

Ordered Si/Si–O nanowire array and its optical properties

Glancing angle deposition (GLAD) has been employed to fabricate the Si/Si–O nanowires (NWs). The perpendicular NW on silicon substrate shows the amorphous nature. The visible light emission from the NWs was observed from the Si/Si–O nanoparticles. High light absorption inside the Si/Si–O NW structure was recorded.     

Violation of Bell’s inequality in neutral kaons system

We show by general considerations that it is not possible to test violation of the existing versions of Bell’s inequality in entangled neutral kaons system using experimentally accessible thin regenerators. We point out the loophole in the recent argument (A Bramon and M Nowakowski, Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 1 (1999)) that claimed such a test to be possible.     

Generic entangling through quantum indistinguishability

We present a general scheme for entangling any degree of freedom of two uncorrelated identical particles from independent sources by a combination of two-particle interferometry and which-way detection. We show that this entanglement generation procedure works for completely random initial states of the variable to be entangled. We also demonstrate a curious complementarity exhibited by our scheme and its applications in estimating the generated entanglement as a function of wave packet overlap at the beamsplitter.     

Theoretical study of the effective electron mass in ternary chalcopyrite semiconductors in the presence of crossed electric and magnetic fields

An attempt is made to investigate theoretically the effective electron mass in ternary chalcopyrite semiconductors at low temperatures on the basis of a newly derived dispersion relation of the conduction electrons under cross fields for the more generalized case which occurs from the consideration of the various types of anisotropies in the energy spectrum. It is found, taking degeneraten-CdGeAs₂ as an example, that the effective electron mass at the Fermi level along the direction of magnetic quantization depends on both the Fermi energy and the magnetic quantum number due to the combined influence of the crystal field splitting parameter and the anisotropic spin-orbit splitting parameter respectively, resulting in different effective masses at the Fermi level corresponding to different magnetic sub-bands. It is also observed that the same mass at the Fermi level in the direction normal to both magnetic and electric fields also varies both with Fermi energy and magnetic sub-band index, and the characteristic feature of cross-fields is to introduce the index-dependent oscillatory mass anisotropy. The theoretical results are in good agreement with the experimental observations as reported elsewhere.     

Thermodynamic implications of the gravitationally induced particle creation scenario

A rigorous thermodynamic analysis has been done as regards the apparent horizon of a spatially flat Friedmann–Lemaitre–Robertson–Walker universe for the gravitationally induced particle creation scenario with constant specific entropy and an arbitrary particle creation rate \(\Gamma \). Assuming a perfect fluid equation of state \(p=(\gamma -1)\rho \) with \(\frac{2}{3} \le \gamma \le 2\), the first law, the generalized second law (GSL), and thermodynamic equilibrium have been studied, and an expression for the total entropy (i.e., horizon entropy plus fluid entropy) has been obtained which does not contain \(\Gamma \) explicitly. Moreover, a lower bound for the fluid temperature \(T_f\) has also been found which is given by \(T_f \ge 8\left( \frac{\frac{3\gamma }{2}-1}{\frac{2}{\gamma }-1}\right) H^2\). It has been shown that the GSL is satisfied for \(\frac{\Gamma }{3H} \le 1\). Further, when \(\Gamma \) is constant, thermodynamic equilibrium is always possible for \(\frac{1}{2}<\frac{\Gamma }{3H} < 1\), while for \(\frac{\Gamma }{3H} \le \text {min}\left\{ \frac{1}{2},\frac{2\gamma -2}{3\gamma -2} \right\} \) and \(\frac{\Gamma }{3H} \ge 1\), equilibrium can never be attained. Thermodynamic arguments also lead us to believe that during the radiation phase, \(\Gamma \le H\). When \(\Gamma \) is not a constant, thermodynamic equilibrium holds if \(\ddot{H} \ge \frac{27}{4}\gamma ^2 H^3 \left( 1-\frac{\Gamma }{3H}\right) ^2\), however, such a condition is by no means necessary for the attainment of equilibrium.     

Helicity-dependent generalized parton distributions for nonzero skewness

We investigate the helicity-dependent generalized parton distributions (GPDs) in momentum as well as transverse position (impact) spaces for the u and d quarks in a proton when the momentum transfer in both the transverse and the longitudinal directions are nonzero. The GPDs are evaluated using the light-front wave functions of a quark–diquark model for nucleon where the wave functions are constructed by the soft-wall AdS/QCD correspondence. We also express the GPDs in the boost-invariant longitudinal position space.