The use of aluminum (Al) as a plasmonic building block has drawn increasing attention of late, due to its natural abundance, and extended tunability into the ultraviolet range. However, a controllable way to grow Al nanowires (NWs) in a bottom-up manner has not been reported. Here a facile, stress-induced growth process for Al nanowires, influenced by the concentration of applied hydrofluoric acid, is reported. Physical characterizations show the nanowires to be polycrystalline fcc Al with ultrasmooth surfaces, with many possible cross-section geometries, making them potential candidates for Al plasmonic investigations and applications. Dark-field optical analysis of a crescent-shaped Al NW demonstrates its plasmonic nature. These results may stimulate new interest in the fabrication of unconventional, nearly one dimensional Al nanostructures. (C) 2014 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
To study the effect of Cu doping, In2O3 and Cu-doped In2O3 films were deposited on K9 glass and Si substrates with the same experimental parameters. All the films were found to be body centered cubic and have the same preferred orientation. No secondary phases were detected in Cu-doped In2O3. The atomic ratio of Cu to Cu plus In was approximately 18% in Cu-doped In2O3 films which were found to be n-type. After Cu doping, the resistivity of the films increased by 3 to 4 orders of magnitude and the film with higher Cu content had larger resistivity, due to compensation. Cu doping is found to widen the optical band gap of In2O3 films, possibly due to a metal-insulator transition. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
Ye, Fan
Moon, Dominic H.
Carpenter, William R.
Reeve, Bryce B.
Usinger, Deborah S.
Green, Rebecca L.
Spearman, Kiayni
Sheets, Nathan C.
Pearlstein, Kevin A.
Lucero, Angela R.
Waddle, Mark R.
Godley, Paul A.
Chen, Ronald C.
Information relaxation and duality in Markov decision processes have been studied recently by several researchers with the goal to derive dual bounds on the value function. In this paper we extend this dual formulation to controlled Markov diffusions: in a similar way we relax the constraint that the decision should be made based on the current information and impose a penalty to punish the access to the information in advance. We establish the weak duality, strong duality and complementary slackness results in a parallel way as those in Markov decision processes. We further explore the structure of the optimal penalties and expose the connection between the optimal penalties for Markov decision processes and controlled Markov diffusions. We demonstrate the use of this dual representation in a classic dynamic portfolio choice problem through a new class of penalties, which require little extra computation and produce small duality gap on the optimal value.
Traditionally, retroreflectivity is used to quantify the visibility of traffic control devices, including pavement markings. However, retroreflectivity is a physical property of a material that is used as a surrogate for luminance. By itself, retroreflectivity is limited to describing the visibility of pavement markings at night. One way to quantify the visibility of pavement markings at night is to assess the visibility level (VL) from the perspective of a driver's visual demands. This paper introduces an extended VL model for pavement markings that is based on previous research on VL modeling. This model was used to determine the visibility of in-service pavement markings along lit and unlit sections of highway in Anchorage, Alaska. The measured retroreflectivity of the pavement markings was compared with the FHWA proposed minimum retroreflectivity levels for pavement markings, and the calculated VL was compared with the implied visibility of the pavement markings (also calculated from the VL model) as derived from the FHWA proposed minimum retroreflectivity levels. The results indicated that the visibility of areas with continuous roadway lighting appeared to be more than adequate, despite low retroreflectivity levels. The benefit of the roadway lighting was most evident when the retroreflectivity of the pavement markings was relatively low and at the longer distances tested (54 and 64 m).
In at least one embodiment, a method and a system include a node potentially having information responsive to an information request distributed into, for example, a federated coalition network where the node receives at least one information request packet, conducts a search of information at the node to determine if requested information is present, when the requested information is present, then the node sends an acknowledgement to a requesting node, linear network codes the requested information into m packets where m is greater than or equal to k, which is the number of packets needed to be received by the requesting node to reconstruct the requested information, selects multiple paths between the node and the requesting node such that no third party will see more than k-1 different packets, and transmits the m packets distributed over the selected paths. In a further embodiment, the method and system include operation of the network to have the capability to provide responsive information in a protected way.
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