The effect of externally applied uniaxial compressive stress on the magnetic properties of power MnZn-ferrites

In this article, the effect of uniaxial compressive stress with magnitude up to ~53 MPa on the magnetic properties of power MnZn-ferrites of the general chemical formula Mn_0.81Zn_0.19Fe_2+δΟ₄ has been investigated. In addition, the effects of various process operational or material structural parameters such as sintering partial pressure of oxygen, final density and grain size on the stress sensitivity of the polycrystalline component have been studied. As found, the temperature of the secondary initial permeability maximum and the power loss minimum are reduced by ~0.5 °C MPa^?1 while the magnetic flux density by ~1.4 mT MPa^?1 upon the exertion of uniaxial compressive stress on the component. The sintering partial pressure of oxygen exhibits an optimum at which the material stress sensitivity becomes minimum. The results have been explained on the basis of variations induced in the anisotropy field as well as on the basis of the defect structure of the material and its dependency on the partial pressure of oxygen.     

Traceable laser power measurements of diode laser radiation in the near infrared

We report a new calibration setup for laser radiometry at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt, the German National Metrology Institute. Measurements of laser diode power of free beam diode lasers in the near infrared spectral range at a wavelength of 808 nm for powers up to 250 W and at wavelengths of 915 nm, 940 nm, and 980 nm for laser powers up to 25 W have been established. The calibration setup, the standard detector, the uncertainty budget and first calibration results will be presented and discussed. The standard uncertainty of the HLR302 standard detector is 0.2%. This uncertainty might be the main contribution to the overall uncertainty in customer calibrations, depending on the quality of the transfer detectors.     

Acyl-CoA Binding Protein Gene Ablation Induces Pre-implantation Embryonic Lethality in Mice

Unique among the intracellular lipid binding proteins, acyl-CoA binding protein (ACBP) exclusively binds long-chain fatty acyl-CoAs (LCFA-CoAs). To test if ACBP is an essential protein in mammals, the ACBP gene was ablated by homologous recombination in mice. While ACBP heterozygotes appeared phenotypically normal, intercrossing of the heterozygotes did not produce any live homozygous deficient (null) ACBP^(−/−) pups. Heterozygous and wild type embryos were detected at all post-implantation stages, but no homozygous ACBP-null embryos were obtained—suggesting that an embryonic lethality occurred at a pre-implantation stage of development, or that embryos never formed. While ACBP-null embryos were not detected at any blastocyst stage, ACBP-null embryos were detected at the morula (8-cell), cleavage (2-cell), and zygote (1-cell) pre-implantation stages. Two other LCFA-CoA binding proteins, sterol carrier protein-2 (SCP-2) and sterol carrier protein-x (SCP-x) were significantly upregulated at these stages. These findings demonstrate for the first time that ACBP is an essential protein required for embryonic development and its loss of function may be initially compensated by concomitant upregulation of two other LCFA-CoA binding proteins, but only at the earliest pre-implantation stages. The fact that ACBP is the first known intracellular lipid binding protein whose deletion results in embryonic lethality suggests its vital importance in mammals.     

Investigating fuzzy-input fuzzy-output support vector machines for robust voice quality classification

The dynamic use of voice qualities in spoken language can reveal useful information on a speakers attitude, mood and affective states. This information may be very desirable for a range of, both input and output, speech technology applications. However, voice quality annotation of speech signals may frequently produce far from consistent labeling. Groups of annotators may disagree on the perceived voice quality, but whom should one trust or is the truth somewhere in between? The current study looks first to describe a voice quality feature set that is suitable for differentiating voice qualities on a tense to breathy dimension. Further, the study looks to include these features as inputs to a fuzzy-input fuzzy-output support vector machine (F²SVM) algorithm, which is in turn capable of softly categorizing voice quality recordings. The F²SVM is compared in a thorough analysis to standard crisp approaches and shows promising results, while outperforming for example standard support vector machines with the sole difference being that the F²SVM approach receives fuzzy label information during training. Overall, it is possible to achieve accuracies of around 90% for both speaker dependent (cross validation) and speaker independent (leave one speaker out validation) experiments. Additionally, the approach using F²SVM performs at an accuracy of 82% for a cross corpus experiment (i.e. training and testing on entirely different recording conditions) in a frame-wise analysis and of around 97% after temporally integrating over full sentences. Furthermore, the output of fuzzy measures gave performances close to that of human annotators.     

Correlation of structural and optoelectronic properties of thin film silicon prepared at the transition from microcrystalline to amorphous growth

Photovoltaic properties of 4 µm thick microcrystalline silicon p–i–n solar cells have been studied, over a range of crystallinity determined using Raman spectroscopy. Low-crystallinity material (below 10%) appears to absorb disproportionately strongly in the infrared, possibly due to increased light scattering or to relaxation of the crystal momentum selection rule. A minimum in solar cell efficiency is observed under AM1.5 illumination when V_OC ≈ 580 mV, with blue response most strongly affected. This is consistent with a reduction in electron mobility to a value below that of amorphous silicon for low-crystallinity material, in agreement with time-of-flight measurements.