Plastic deformation of copper single crystals by wedge indentations

Plastic deformations due to wedge indentation of copper single crystals with three different orientations are quantitatively assessed by analyses of deformed grid patterns on the specimens. Deformed regions, which are subdivided into six regions in terms of slip traces, are found to extend for 10–13 times the contact site size between the wedge and the specimen. The distortions near the contact site show that the deformations are generally characterized by typical features of strains and material rotation such as negative ?_x (normal strain in the indentation direction) in the deep region, positive ?_x in the shallow region, negative γ_xy(engineering shear strain) in the intermediate region and rotation contracting the material in the indentation direction. Although such distortions are affected by the feasibility of cross slip and the orientation dependence of the elasticity, they indicate that the overall material flow is similar to that in polycrystalline metals.     

In vivo visualization of neurotransmitter function in the human brain by PET

Moving along a microtubule, kinesin follows a course parallel to the protofilaments; but it is not known whether kinesin binds exclusively on a single protofilament. The presence of zinc during tubulin polymerization induces sheets where neighboring protofilaments are antiparallel. If kinesin could support the motility of these zinc-sheets, then the binding site for a kinesin molecule would be limited to a single protofilament. Kamimura and Mandelkow [1992: J. Cell Biol. 118:865-75] reported that kinesin moves along zinc-sheets. We found that zinc-sheets grown under their conditions often had a microtubule-like structure along one edge. We confirmed the possibility that the motility observed by Kamimura and Mandelkow [1992: J. Cell Biol. 118:865-75] is attributed to the microtubule-like structure rather than the zinc-sheet. To resolve the question of whether kinesin can recognize an antiparallel protofilament lattice, we investigated the kinesin-mediated motility of zinc-macrotubes. At higher free zinc concentrations, zinc-sheets roll up as macrotubes, free of edges. In the presence of 10 microM taxol and 100 nM free Zn2+ at pH 6.8, the samples were shown by electron microscopy to contain only macrotubes. Under these buffer conditions, kinesin could bind strongly to axonemal doublets in the presence of AMP-PNP, and generate motility in the presence of ATP, but kinesin did not bind to nor move the macrotubes. This shows that kinesin cannot bind efficiently to nor move on the anti-parallel lattice; it is possible (though not necessary) that the groove between two parallel protofilaments is required for kinesin's motility.     

Correlation between Superconducting Gap and Pseudogap in High-T c Cuprates

We studied the low-temperature energy gap 2 ₀ on Bi ₂ Sr ₂ CaCu ₂ o ₈₊ (Bi2212) and La _2–x Sr _x CuCO ₄ (La214) systematically over a wide range of doping level p using STS, break junction tunneling spectroscopy, Raman scattering and low-T electronic specific heat data. We have also studied the electronic specific heat of La214 in the normal state at T > T _c , and confirmed that pseudogap behavior appears at around T*, below which the in-plane resistivity and magnetic susceptibility tend to be slightly suppressed. Similar suppression appears in and of Bi2212 below the onset temperature of pseudogap T*. It is pointed out in the present study that 2 ₀ is closely related to T* in both Bi2212 and La214 systems; T* 2 ₀ /4.3k _B . It is also pointed out that 2 ₀ is in almost linear proportion to k _B T _max ( T*), where T _max is the temperature exhibiting a broad peak in –T curves and k _B T _max can be considered to give a measure of the effective antiferromagnetic exchange energy J _eff. The factors in 2 ₀ k _B T _max J _eff are 1 for La214 and 2 for Bi2212, respectively. We also report that in both Bi22l2 and La214 systems T _c roughly scales with p ₀ except in highly doped samples, where T _c 2 ₀ .     

In Situ Grazing-Incidence Wide-Angle Scattering Reveals Mechanisms for Phase Distribution and Disorientation in 2D Halide Perovskite Films

2D hybrid halide perovskites with the formula (A′)₂(A)_n-1Pb_nI_3n+1 have remarkable stability and promising efficiency in photovoltaic and optoelectronic devices, yet fundamental understanding of film formation, key to optimizing these devices, is lacking. Here, in situ grazing-incidence wide-angle X-ray scattering (GIWAXS) is used to monitor film formation during spin-coating. This elucidates the general film formation mechanism of 2D halide perovskites during one-step spin-coating. There are three stages of film formation: sol–gel, oriented 3D, and 2D. Three precursor phases form during the sol–gel stage and transform to perovskite, first giving a highly oriented 3D-like phase at the air/liquid interface followed by subsequent nucleations forming slightly less oriented 2D perovskite. Furthermore, heating before crystallization leads to fewer nucleations and faster removal of the precursors, improving orientation. This outlines the primary causes of phase distribution and perpendicular orientation in 2D perovskite films and paves the way for rationally designed film fabrication techniques.     

Ultrafast Carrier Dynamics and Bandgap Renormalization in Layered PtSe2

Carrier interactions in 2D nanostructures are of central importance not only in condensed‐matter physics but also for a wide range of optoelectronic and photonic applications. Here, new insights into the behavior of photoinduced carriers in layered platinum diselenide (PtSe₂) through ultrafast time‐resolved pump–probe and nonlinear optical measurements are presented. The measurements reveal the temporal evolution of carrier relaxation, chemical potential and bandgap renormalization in PtSe₂. These results imply that few‐layer PtSe₂ has a semiconductor‐like carrier relaxation instead of a metal‐like one. The relaxation follows a triple‐exponential decay process and exhibits thickness‐dependent relaxation times. This occurs along with a band‐filling effect, which can be controlled based on the number of layers and may be applied in saturable absorption for generating ultrafast laser pulses. The findings may provide means to study many‐body physics in 2D materials as well as potentially leading to applications in the field of optoelectronics and ultrafast photonics.     

Termight: Coordinating Humans and Machines in Bilingual Terminology Acquisition

We propose a semi-automatic tool, termight, that supports the construction of bilingual glossaries. Termight consists of two components which address the two subtasks in glossary construction: (a) preparing a monolingual list of all technical terms in a source-language document, and (b) finding the translations for these terms in parallel source–target documents. As a first step (in each component) the tool extracts automatically candidate terms and candidate translations, based on term-extraction and word-alignment algorithms. It then performs several additional preprocessing steps which greatly facilitate human post-editing of the candidate lists. These steps include grouping and sorting of candidates and associating example concordance lines with each candidate. Finally, the data prepared in preprocessing is presented to the user via an interactive interface which supports quick post-editing operations. Termight was deployed by translators at AT & T Business Translation Services (formerly AT & T Language Line Services) leading to very high rates of semi-automatic glossary construction.     

Bittracker-a bitmap tracker for visual tracking under very general conditions

This paper addresses the problem of visual tracking under very general conditions: a possibly non-rigid target whose appearance may drastically change over time; general camera motion; a 3D scene; and no a priori information except initialization. This is in contrast to the vast majority of trackers which rely on some limited model in which, for example, the target's appearance is known a priori or restricted, the scene is planar, or a pan tilt zoom camera is used. Their goal is to achieve speed and robustness, but their limited context may cause them to fail in the more general case. The proposed tracker works by approximating, in each frame, a PDF (probability distribution function) of the target's bitmap and then estimating the maximum a posteriori bitmap. The PDF is marginalized over all possible motions per pixel, thus avoiding the stage in which optical flow is determined. This is an advantage over other general-context trackers that do not use the motion cue at all or rely on the error-prone calculation of optical flow. Using a Gibbs distribution with respect to the first-order neighborhood system yields a bitmap PDF whose maximization may be transformed into that of a quadratic pseudo-Boolean function, the maximum of which is approximated via a reduction to a maximum-flow problem. Many experiments were conducted to demonstrate that the tracker is able to track under the aforementioned general context.     

A new backpropagation learning algorithm for layered neural networks with nondifferentiable units

We propose a digital version of the backpropagation algorithm (DBP) for three-layered neural networks with nondifferentiable binary units. This approach feeds teacher signals to both the middle and output layers, whereas with a simple perceptron, they are given only to the output layer. The additional teacher signals enable the DBP to update the coupling weights not only between the middle and output layers but also between the input and middle layers. A neural network based on DBP learning is fast and easy to implement in hardware. Simulation results for several linearly nonseparable problems such as XOR demonstrate that the DBP performs favorably when compared to the conventional approaches. Furthermore, in large-scale networks, simulation results indicate that the DBP provides high performance.