Argonne National Laboratory

About: Argonne National Laboratory is a facility organization based out in Lemont, Illinois, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Scattering & Superconductivity. The organization has 28461 authors who have published 64372 publications receiving 2479249 citations. The organization is also known as: ANL & Metallurgical Laboratory.

Mechanistic Study of Lithium Aluminum Oxide Atomic Layer Deposition

Abstract: There is significant interest in developing lithium conductive thin films that have potential applications as lithium-permeable electrode barrier coatings and as solid electrolytes in thin film batteries. In this work, we demonstrate the atomic layer deposition (ALD) of lithium aluminum oxide (LiAlOx) thin films and provide a thorough characterization of the growth mechanism. LiAlOx thin films were deposited by combining the ALD processes for Al2O3 (trimethylaluminum and water) and LiOH (lithium tert-butoxide and water). The composition of the films was controlled by adjusting the percentage of LiOH cycles. Both the pure LiOH process and the combined LiAlOx process were characterized by a combination of quartz crystal microbalance, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, and film deposition studies. These studies revealed a complex growth mechanism that is strongly affected by the hygroscopic and reactive LiOH component. Stable ALD with a constant growth rate as a function of ALD cycles was only achieved...

Scalable parallel building blocks for custom data analysis

Abstract: We present a set of building blocks that provide scalable data movement capability to computational scientists and visualization researchers for writing their own parallel analysis. The set includes scalable tools for domain decomposition, process assignment, parallel I/O, global reduction, and local neighborhood communicationtasks that are common across many analysis applications. The global reduction is performed with a new algorithm, described in this paper, that efficiently merges blocks of analysis results into a smaller number of larger blocks. The merging is configurable in the number of blocks that are reduced in each round, the number of rounds, and the total number of resulting blocks. We highlight the use of our library in two analysis applications: parallel streamline generation and parallel Morse-Smale topological analysis. The first case uses an existing local neighborhood communication algorithm, whereas the latter uses the new merge algorithm.

Structure and mechanism of human PrimPol, a DNA polymerase with primase activity.

Abstract: PrimPol is a novel human enzyme that contains both DNA primase and DNA polymerase activities. We present the first structure of human PrimPol in ternary complex with a DNA template-primer and an incoming deoxynucleoside triphosphate (dNTP). The ability of PrimPol to function as a DNA primase stems from a simple but remarkable feature—almost complete lack of contacts to the DNA primer strand. This, in turn, allows two dNTPs to bind initiation and elongation sites on the enzyme for the formation of the first dinucleotide. PrimPol shows the ability to synthesize DNA opposite ultraviolet (UV) lesions; however, unexpectedly, the active-site cleft of the enzyme is constrained, which precludes the bypass of UV-induced DNA lesions by conventional translesion synthesis. Together, the structure addresses long-standing questions about how DNA primases actually initiate synthesis and how primase and polymerase activities combine in a single enzyme to carry out DNA synthesis.