There is, I think, something ethereal about i —the square root of minus one. I remember first hearing about it at school. It seemed an odd beast at that time—an intruder hovering on the edge of reality.

Usually familiarity dulls this sense of the bizarre, but in the case of i it was the reverse: over the years the sense of its surreal nature intensified. It seemed that it was impossible to write mathematics that described the real world in …

I and i

Deposits of clastic carbonate-dominated (calciclastic) sedimentary slope systems in the rock record have been identified mostly as linearly-consistent carbonate apron deposits, even though most ancient clastic carbonate slope deposits fit the submarine fan systems better. Calciclastic submarine fans are consequently rarely described and are poorly understood. Subsequently, very little is known especially in mud-dominated calciclastic submarine fan systems. Presented in this study are a sedimentological core and petrographic characterisation of samples from eleven boreholes from the Lower Carboniferous of Bowland Basin (Northwest England) that reveals a >250 m thick calciturbidite complex deposited in a calciclastic submarine fan setting. Seven facies are recognised from core and thin section characterisation and are grouped into three carbonate turbidite sequences. They include: 1) Calciturbidites, comprising mostly of highto low-density, wavy-laminated bioclast-rich facies; 2) low-density densite mudstones which are characterised by planar laminated and unlaminated muddominated facies; and 3) Calcidebrites which are muddy or hyper-concentrated debrisflow deposits occurring as poorly-sorted, chaotic, mud-supported floatstones. These

Phd by thesis

Recent years have witnessed many breakthroughs in research on graphene (the first two-dimensional atomic crystal) as well as a significant advance in the mass production of this material. This one-atom-thick fabric of carbon uniquely combines extreme mechanical strength, exceptionally high electronic and thermal conductivities, impermeability to gases, as well as many other supreme properties, all of which make it highly attractive for numerous applications. Here we review recent progress in graphene research and in the development of production methods, and critically analyse the feasibility of various graphene applications.

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A roadmap for graphene

QUANTUM gravitational effects are usually ignored in calculations of the formation and evolution of black holes. The justification for this is that the radius of curvature of space-time outside the event horizon is very large compared to the Planck length (Għ/c3)1/2 ≈ 10−33 cm, the length scale on which quantum fluctuations of the metric are expected to be of order unity. This means that the energy density of particles created by the gravitational field is small compared to the space-time curvature. Even though quantum effects may be small locally, they may still, however, add up to produce a significant effect over the lifetime of the Universe ≈ 1017 s which is very long compared to the Planck time ≈ 10−43 s. The purpose of this letter is to show that this indeed may be the case: it seems that any black hole will create and emit particles such as neutrinos or photons at just the rate that one would expect if the black hole was a body with a temperature of (κ/2π) (ħ/2k) ≈ 10−6 (M/M)K where κ is the surface gravity of the black hole1. As a black hole emits this thermal radiation one would expect it to lose mass. This in turn would increase the surface gravity and so increase the rate of emission. The black hole would therefore have a finite life of the order of 1071 (M/M)−3 s. For a black hole of solar mass this is much longer than the age of the Universe. There might, however, be much smaller black holes which were formed by fluctuations in the early Universe2. Any such black hole of mass less than 1015 g would have evaporated by now. Near the end of its life the rate of emission would be very high and about 1030 erg would be released in the last 0.1 s. This is a fairly small explosion by astronomical standards but it is equivalent to about 1 million 1 Mton hydrogen bombs. It is often said that nothing can escape from a black hole. But in 1974, Stephen Hawking realized that, owing to quantum effects, black holes should emit particles with a thermal distribution of energies — as if the black hole had a temperature inversely proportional to its mass. In addition to putting black-hole thermodynamics on a firmer footing, this discovery led Hawking to postulate 'black hole explosions', as primordial black holes end their lives in an accelerating release of energy.

Black Hole Explosions

Terahertz spectroscopy systems use far-infrared radiation to extract molecular spectral information in an otherwise inaccessible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Materials research is an essential component of modern terahertz systems: novel, higher-power terahertz sources rely heavily on new materials such as quantum cascade structures. At the same time, terahertz spectroscopy and imaging provide a powerful tool for the characterization of a broad range of materials, including semiconductors and biomolecules.

Materials for terahertz science and technology

: Progress in the research of modern semiconductor devices has advanced their response frequencies above 400 GHz. Such performance exceeds the conventional, purely electronic test instrumentation bandwidth, with the major limitations being imposed by the connectors and waveguides that are required for signal coupling to the device under test. This lack of convenient and accurate high-bandwidth device characterization methods imposes a serious obstacle to progress in semiconductor device development and utilization.

100-GHz Electro-Optic S-Parameter Characterization of High-Electron-Mobility Transistors,

Sub-10-attosecond pulses with half-cycle electric fields provide exceptional options to detect and manipulate electrons in the atomic timescale. However, the availability of such pulses is still challenging. Here, we propose a method to generate isolated sub-10-attosecond half-cycle pulses based on a cascade process naturally happening in plasma. A 100s-attosecond pulse is first generated by shooting a moderate overdense plasma with a one-cycle femtosecond pulse. After that, the generated attosecond pulse cascadedly produce a sub-10-attosecond half-cycle pulse in the transmission direction by unipolarly perturbing a nanometer-thin relativistic electron sheet naturally form in the plasma. Two-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations indicate that an isolated half-cycle pulse with the duration of 8.3 attoseconds can be produced. Apart from one-cycle driving pulse, such a scheme also can be realized with a commercial 100-TW 25-fs driving laser by shaping the pulse with a relativistic plasma lens in advance.

Cascaded Generation of a Sub-10-Attosecond Half-Cycle Pulse.

We demonstrate the scalability of fiber phase locking system using interferometric method. The system allows complete phase error map measurement with a /60 rms accuracy in a single acquisition of only 6 pixels per fiber.

Highly scalable coherent fiber combining using interferometric technique

Summary form only given. As reported recently for boron and gallium, we have measured factors greater than 2 for isotopic enrichment in the multiple-charge state ions from ultrafast laser ablation plasmas. The earlier work has now been extended to the elements Zn, Ti, and Cu. These results confirm the enrichment of the lighter isotope on the target-normal axis of the expanding ablation plume. Angular scans of these plumes demonstrate the persistence of the enrichment effect to wide angle, being present as far out as 45 degrees from the normal direction. Systematic variations in the dominant ion species and their energy distributions, as a function of charge state, are observed in these angular scans.

Isotope enrichment in highly-charged ionic species of ultrafast laser ablation plumes

Summary form only given. In this summary, we present the first Yb:GdCOB regenerative chirped pulse amplification system to produce 12-mJ, and 350-fs pulses. We have extracted reasonable amount of energy from Yb:GdCOB. If we employ a diode-pumping scheme, we could obtain hundreds, of milli-joule pulses with high repetition rate.

Gerard Mourou

Papers

100-GHz Electro-Optic S-Parameter Characterization of High-Electron-Mobility Transistors,

Cascaded Generation of a Sub-10-Attosecond Half-Cycle Pulse.

Highly scalable coherent fiber combining using interferometric technique

Isotope enrichment in highly-charged ionic species of ultrafast laser ablation plumes

Yb:GdCOB regenerative amplifier