From structural ceramics to 2D materials with multi-applications: A review on the development from MAX phases to MXenes

MAX phases (Ti3SiC2, Ti3AlC2, V2AlC, Ti4AlN3, etc.) are layered ternary carbides/nitrides, which are generally processed and researched as structure ceramics. S...     

Stable sodium metal anode enhanced by advanced electrolytes with SbF3 additive

The practical application of sodium metal batteries (SMBs) is hampered due to the inferior interfacial stability between Na metal and conventional electrolytes....     

Preparation and structure of fluorinated/non-fluorinated polyacrylate gradient emulsion blend film

The emulsion blend method, which is environmentally friendly and energy saving, was used to prepare a compositional gradient film of fluorinated/non-fluorinated polyacrylate in this paper. The size and glass-transition temperature (T_g) of the emulsion particles were designed to enhance the driving force of their selective congregation and promote the formation of gradient structure. The structures and surface properties of the obtained films were characterized. The results showed that when the fluorinated components have much smaller particle size and higher T_g than those of fluorine-free polyacrylate components, the gradient structures formed in the direction across the film thickness of the films. The concentration of the fluorinated component increased gradually from film-glass interface to film-air interface in the blend film, making the surface free energies of the two sides of the gradient film distinctively different.     

Growth and characterization of Pb0.97La0.02(Zr0.66Sn0.27Ti0.07)O3 antiferroelectric single crystals

Single crystals of Pb_0.97La_0.02(Zr_0.66Sn_0.27Ti_0.07)O₃ (PLZST) with the composition near the morphotropic phase boundary were grown by the flux method. The PbO–PbF₂–B₂O₃ system was used as a solvent. PLZST single crystals with the size of 4–6 mm are obtained and these crystals are slightly translucent after polishing. The splitting of (200) reflection peak indicates that the obtained crystals are of a single phase with tetragonal perovskite structure. The element contents of the grown crystals were measured by inductively coupled plasma atomic emission spectrometry. The chemical composition of the crystals is Pb_0.979La_0.014(Zr_0.666Sn_0.285Ti_0.049)O₃. Thermal properties and dielectric properties of PLZST single crystals were studied. The results show that flux-grown PLZST single crystals exhibit obvious endothermic processes and relaxor behaviors near the phase transition temperatures.     

Design study of APS-U-type hybrid-MBA lattice for mid-energy DLSR

In recent years,a new generation of storage ring-based light sources,known as diffraction-limited storage rings(DLSRs),whose emittance approaches the diffractio...     

Effect of particle size distribution on green properties during high velocity compaction

Iron powders with two different particle size distributions were compacted by high velocity compaction. The influences of particle size distribution and impact velocity on green properties, including green density, springback, tensile strength and bending strength etc., were studied with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and a computer controlled universal testing machine. The results show that the particle size distribution and the impact velocity strongly affect its properties. Wider size distribution results in green compact with higher density and better strength. Furthermore, springback of compacts is lower produced by the powder with wider size distribution, especially for radial springback. As impact velocity increases, its green density and green strength gradually increases, but the increasing rate of density decreases gradually. No special relation is found between springback and impact velocity. In addition, the axial springback and the bending strength are higher than the radial springback and the tensile strength, respectively.     

Effect of carrier screening on ZnO-based resistive switching memory devices

The carrier screening effect occurs commonly in dielectric materials. It reduces the electric potential gradient, thus negatively affecting the functionality of resistive random access memory (RRAM) devices. An Au/ZnO film/Al-doped ZnO device fabricated in this work exhibited no resistive switching (RS), which was attributed to the carrier screening effect. Therefore, annealing was used for alleviating the screening effect, significantly enhancing the RS property. In addition, different on/off ratios were obtained for various bias values, and the screening effect was accounted for by investigating electron transport mechanisms. Furthermore, different annealing temperatures were employed to modulate the free carrier concentration in ZnO films to alleviate the screening effect. The maximal on/off ratio reached 10⁵ at an annealing temperature of 600 °C, yielding the lowest number of free carriers and the weakest screening effect in ZnO films. This work investigates the screening effect in RS devices. The screening effect not only modulates the characteristics of memory devices but also provides insight into the mechanism of RS in these devices.

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Metallic Graphene Nanoribbons

Isolated graphene nanoribbons(GNRs)usually have energy gaps,which scale with their widths,owing to the lateral quantum confinement effect of GNRs.The absence of metallic GNRs limits their applications in device interconnects or being one-dimensional physics platform to research amazing properties based on metallicity.A recent study published in Science provided a novel method to produce metallic GNRs by inserting a symmetric superlattice into other semiconductive GNRs.This finding will broader the applications of GNRs both in nanoelectronics and fundamental science.     

A formal architectural model for logical agent mobility

The process of agent migration is the major difference between logical code mobility of software agents and physical mobility of mobile nodes in ad hoc networks. Without considering agent transfer, it would make little sense to mention the modeling of strong code mobility, which aims to make a migrated agent restarted exactly from the state when it was stopped before migration. From the perspective of system's architecture, this paper proposes a two-layer approach for the formal modeling of logical agent mobility (LAM) using predicate/transition (PrT) nets. We view a mobile agent system as a set of agent spaces and agents could migrate from one space to another. Each agent space is explicitly abstracted to be a component, consisting of an environmental part and an internal connector dynamically binding agents with their environment. We use a system net, agent nets, and a connector net to model the environment, agents, and the connector, respectively. In particular, agent nets are packed up as parts of tokens in system nets, so that agent transfer and location change are naturally captured by transition firing (token game) in Petri nets. Agent nets themselves are active only at specific places and disabled at all the other places in a system net. The semantics of such a two-layer LAM model is defined by transforming it into a PrT net. This facilitates the analysis of several properties about location, state, and connection. In addition, this paper also presents a case study of modeling and analyzing an information retrieval system with mobile agents.