New optical material europium EDTA complex in polyvinyl pyrrolidone films with fluorescence enhanced by silver plasmons

In our search for efficient Luminescent Solar Concentrators (LSC) we have prepared polyvinyl pyrrolidone (PVP) films incorporated by ethylenediamine tetraacetic acid (EDTA) complex of europium and co-doped with silver nanoparticles (NPs). Steady state fluorescence was studied under weak and strong excitation. Dynamical study was performed by second harmonic of Nd laser. Under weak excitation the fluorescence of europium co-doped with silver plasmons increased by a factor of three and excited by continuous laser by a factor of 50. The lifetimes of films doped by the complex were 755 μs and co-doped with silver nanoparticles 946 μs. This is the first finding that the photon density accumulates the number of plasmons interacting with electronic states of europium increasing its transition probability resulting in the strong intensification of fluorescence. In dynamical measurements of lifetimes a single pulse does not provide enough energy to create such number of plasmons.     

Weighted argument systems: Basic definitions, algorithms, and complexity results

We introduce and investigate a natural extension of Dung's well-known model of argument systems in which attacks are associated with a weight, indicating the relative strength of the attack. A key concept in our framework is the notion of an inconsistency budget, which characterises how much inconsistency we are prepared to tolerate: given an inconsistency budget β, we would be prepared to disregard attacks up to a total weight of β. The key advantage of this approach is that it permits a much finer grained level of analysis of argument systems than unweighted systems, and gives useful solutions when conventional (unweighted) argument systems have none. We begin by reviewing Dung's abstract argument systems, and motivating weights on attacks (as opposed to the alternative possibility, which is to attach weights to arguments). We then present the framework of weighted argument systems. We investigate solutions for weighted argument systems and the complexity of computing such solutions, focussing in particular on weighted variations of grounded extensions. Finally, we relate our work to the most relevant examples of argumentation frameworks that incorporate strengths.     

Assessment of myocardial lesion size during in vitro radio frequency catheter ablation

We report our experience with a system that utilizes changes in several biophysical characteristics of cardiac tissue to determine lesion formation and to estimate lesion size both on and off-line in vitro during radio frequency (RF) energy delivery. We analyzed the reactive and resistive components of tissue impedance and tracked the change of phase angle during RF ablation. We correlated the amount of tissue damage with these and other biophysical parameters and compared them with off-line analysis. We found that there are irreversible changes in the reactive and resistive components of impedance that occurred during tissue ablation. The irreversible changes of these components are greater in magnitude, and correlate better with the size of lesions than that of impedance alone that is currently used. Numerically, the best single on-line and off-line correlation for combined perpendicular and parallel electrode orientation was with phase angle. On-line and off-line capacitance and susceptance correlations were essentially similar suggesting that they may be useful as lesion size predictors, given these parameter's persistent change without temperature sensitivity. This study indicates that it is technically feasible to assess lesion formation using biophysical parameters.     

Smooth functional and structural maps on the neocortex via orthonormal bases of the Laplace-Beltrami operator

Functional and structural maps, such as a curvature, cortical thickness, and functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) maps, indexed over the local coordinates of the cortical manifold play an important role in neuropsychiatric studies. Due to the highly convoluted nature of the cerebral cortex and image quality, these functions are generally uninterpretable without proper methods of association and smoothness onto the local coordinate system. In this paper, we generalized the spline smoothing problem (Wahba, 1990) from a sphere to any arbitrary two-dimensional (2-D) manifold with boundaries. We first seek a numerical solution to orthonormal basis functions of the Laplace-Beltrami (LB) operator with Neumann boundary conditions for a 2-D manifold M then solve the spline smoothing problem in a reproducing kernel Hilbert space (r.k.h.s.) of real-valued functions on manifold M with kernel constructed from the basis functions. The explicit discrete LB representation is derived using the finite element method calculated directly on the manifold coordinates so that finding discrete LB orthonormal basis functions is equivalent to solving an algebraic eigenvalue problem. And then smoothed functions in r.k.h.s can be represented as a linear combination of the basis functions. We demonstrate numerical solutions of spherical harmonics on a unit sphere and brain orthonormal basis functions on a planum temporale manifold. Then synthetic data is used to quantify the goodness of the smoothness compared with the ground truth and discuss how many basis functions should be incorporated in the smoothing. We present applications of our approach to smoothing sulcal mean curvature, cortical thickness, and functional statistical maps on submanifolds of the neocortex.     

Fabrication of organic semiconductor crystalline thin films and crystals from solution by confined crystallization

Highly crystalline thin films of organic semiconductors processed from solution for electronic devices are difficult to achieve due to a slow and preferential three-dimensional growth of the crystals. Here we describe the development of a processing technique to induce a preferential two-dimensional crystalline growth of organic semiconductors by means of minimizing one dimension and confining the solution in two dimensions into a thin layer. The versatility of the process is demonstrated by processing small molecules (TIPS-pentacene and C₆₀) and a polymer (P3HT), all from solvents with a relatively low boiling point, to obtain crystalline thin films. The thin films show an improved in-plane packing of the molecules compared to films processed under similar conditions by spin coating, which is beneficial for the use in organic field-effect transistors.     

Efficient single layer RGB phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes

We report efficient single layer red, green, and blue (RGB) phosphorescent organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) using a “direct hole injection into and transport on triplet dopant” strategy. In particular, red dopant tris(1-phenylisoquinoline)iridium [Ir(piq)₃], green dopant tris(2-phenylpyridine)iridium [Ir(ppy)₃], and blue dopant bis(3,5-difluoro-2-(2-pyridyl)phenyl-(2-carboxypyridyl)iridium [FIrpic] were doped into an electron transporting 1,3,5-tris(N-phenylbenzimidazole-2-yl)benzene (TPBi) host, respectively, to fabricate RGB single layer devices with indium tin oxide (ITO) anode and LiF/Al cathode. It is found that the maximum current efficiencies of the devices are 3.7, 34.5, and 6.8 cd/A, respectively. Moreover, by inserting a pure dopant buffer layer between the ITO anode and the emission layer, the efficiencies are improved to 4.9, 43.3, and 9.8 cd/A, respectively. It is worth noting that the current efficiency of the green simplified device was as high as 34.6 cd/A, even when the luminance was increased to 1000 cd/m² at an extremely low applied voltage of only 4.3 V. A simple accelerated aging test on the green device also shows the lifetime decay of the simplified device is better than that of a traditional multilayered one.     

A Cluster-Based Beaconing Approach in VANETs: Near Optimal Topology Via Proximity Information

A key component for safety applications in Vehicular ad-hoc network (VANET) is the use of periodic beacon messages which provide vehicles with a real-time vehicle proximity map of their surroundings. Based on this map, safety applications can be used for accident prevention by informing drivers about evolving hazardous situations. In order to allow synchronized and cooperative reactions, the target of this work is to design a beacon dissemination process that provides a real-time, broad and coordinated map under the challenging VANET conditions. In order to obtain the desired map, we consider an aggregation-dissemination based scheme for a beacon dissemination process that based on top of a cluster-based topology. To this end, we propose the Distributed Construct Underlying Topology (D-CUT) algorithm tailed specifically to provide an optimized topology for such beacon dissemination process. To deal with the heavy load of beacon messages required for an accurate and broad map, we propose a topology that allows the execution of extensive but reliable spatial bandwidth reuse. Our D-CUT algorithm exploits the real-time and coordinated map for constructing an adaptive and robust topology to deal with the dynamic nature of the VANET environment. We present theoretically provable bounds demonstrating the ability of the algorithm to deal with the dynamic nature of the VANET environment supported by simulation results.