Improvement of the optical properties of electrodeposited CuInSe2 thin films by thermal and chemical treatments

Cu, In and Se have been codeposited in thin films by potentiostatic one-step electrodeposition. The as-deposited material has shown direct optical transitions attributable to the CuInSe₂ semiconductor, but also additional absorption corresponding to another semimetallic phase. The secondary phases are selenium and copper selenide compounds which have been determined by composition measurements. In order to eliminate the semimetallic phases and to improve the semiconductor behaviour of the electrodeposited material, thermal and chemical treatments have been performed. After heat-treatment of the samples at 400°C in flowing argon, elemental selenium loss has been detected together with an enhancement of the allowed direct optical transition. The subsequent chemical etching of the layers in a KCN solution has showed to be successful in eliminating the copper selenide phases which were responsible of the remaining sub-bandgap absorption.     

A gPC-based approach to uncertain transonic aerodynamics

The present paper focus on the stochastic response of a two-dimensional transonic airfoil to parametric uncertainties. Both the freestream Mach number and the angle of attack are considered as random parameters and the generalized Polynomial Chaos (gPC) theory is coupled with standard deterministic numerical simulations through a spectral collocation projection methodology. The results allow for a better understanding of the flow sensitivity to such uncertainties and underline the coupling process between the stochastic parameters. Two kinds of non-linearities are critical with respect to the skin-friction uncertainties: on one hand, the leeward shock movement characteristic of the supercritical profile and on the other hand, the boundary-layer separation on the aft part of the airfoil downstream the shock. The sensitivity analysis, thanks to the Sobol’ decomposition, shows that a strong non-linear coupling exists between the uncertain parameters. Comparisons with the one-dimensional cases demonstrate that the multi-dimensional parametric study is required to get the correct shape and magnitude of the standard deviation distributions of the flow quantities such as pressure and skin-friction.     

Mammalian Golgi apparatus UDP-N-acetylglucosamine transporter: molecular cloning by phenotypic correction of a yeast mutant

Transporters in the Golgi apparatus membrane translocate nucleotide sugars from the cytosol into the Golgi lumen before these can be substrates for the glycosylation of proteins, lipids, and proteoglycans. We have cloned the mammalian Golgi membrane transporter for uridine diphosphate-N-acetylglucosamine by phenotypic correction with cDNA from MDCK cells of a recently characterized Kluyveromyces lactis mutant deficient in Golgi transport of the above nucleotide sugar. Phenotypically corrected transformants were separated from mutants in a fluorescent-activated cell sorter after labeling of K. lactis cells with fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) conjugated to Griffonia simplicifolia II lectin, which binds terminal N-acetylglucosamine. A 2-kb DNA fragment was found to restore the wild-type cell lectin binding phenotype, which reverted to the mutant one upon loss of the plasmid. The DNA fragment contained an ORF encoding a hydrophobic, multitransmembrane spanning protein of 326 aa that had only 22% amino acid sequence identity with the corresponding transporter from K. lactis but showed 53% amino acid sequence identity to the mammalian UDP-galactose transporters and 40% to the CMP-sialic acid transporter. Golgi vesicles from the transformant regained their ability to transport UDP-GlcNAc in an assay in vitro. The above results demonstrate that the mammalian Golgi UDP-GlcNAc transporter gene has all of the necessary information for the protein to be expressed and targeted functionally to the Golgi apparatus of yeast and that two proteins with very different amino acid sequences may transport the same solute within the same Golgi membrane.     

Approaching the Outage Probability of the Amplify-and-Forward Relay Fading Channel

We study coding techniques for the single-relay non-orthogonal amplify-and-forward half-duplex relay fading channel. Unlike the multiple-antenna case, we show that 2times2 rotations induce large gains in outage probability with no increase in decoding complexity under iterative probabilistic decoding. We compare rotated and unrotated turbo-coded schemes and show that they both perform close to their corresponding outage limits.     

Impact of signal constellation expansion on the achievable diversity of pragmatic bit-interleaved space-time codes

This letter studies the effect of signal constellation expansion on the achievable diversity of pragmatic bit-interleaved space-time codes in quasistatic multiple antenna channels. Signal constellation expansion can be obtained either by increasing the size of the constellation in the complex plane or by using multidimensional linear mappings. By means of two simple constructions, we provide a comparison of the two options with message passing decoding. We show that multidimensional expansion achieves some performance advantage over complex-plane expansion at the cost of significantly higher decoding complexity and larger peak-to-average power ratio of the transmitted signals     

Error probability analysis of bit-interleaved coded modulation

This correspondence presents a simple method to accurately compute the error probability of bit-interleaved coded modulation (BICM). Thanks to the binary-input output-symmetric (BIOS) nature of the channel, the pairwise error probability (PEP) is equal to the tail probability of a sum of random variables with a particular distribution. This probability is in turn computed with a saddlepoint approximation. Its precision is numerically validated for coded transmission over standard Gaussian noise and fully interleaved fading channels for both convolutional and turbo-like codes.