Abstract: Production of titanium aluminides in TiO2-Al-Ca system has been investigated. For this purpose, different compositions of raw materials were studied in a special reaction vessel. In a special case, the non-completed reaction of TiO2 with Al and Ca resulted in the production of granulates of titanium aluminides especially Ti3Al and other Ti – Al phases as the metallic product and C...

Many metal-insulator-metal systems show electrically induced resistive switching effects and have therefore been proposed as the basis for future non-volatile memories. They combine the advantages of Flash and DRAM (dynamic random access memories) while avoiding their drawbacks, and they might be highly scalable. Here we propose a coarse-grained classification into primarily thermal, electrical...

Dilute ferromagnetic oxides having Curie temperatures far in excess of 300 K and exceptionally large ordered moments per transition-metal cation challenge our understanding of magnetism in solids. These materials are high-k dielectrics with degenerate or thermally activated n-type semiconductivity. Conventional super-exchange or double-exchange interactions cannot produce long-range magnetic or...

Disorder, primarily in the form of oxygen vacancies, cation stoichiometry and atomic interdiffusion, appear to play vital roles in the electronic and transport properties of the metallic electron liquid at the oxide hetero-interfaces. Antisite disorder is also understood to be a key player in this context. In order to delineate the roles of two of these key factors, we have investigated the eff...

Electronic correlation effects, usually associated with open d or f shells, have so far been considered in p orbitals only sporadically for the localized 2p states of first-row elements. We demonstrate that the partial band occupation and the metallic band-structure character as predicted by local density calculations for II-VI materials containing cation vacancies is removed when the correct e...

Two-dimensional (2D) topological crystalline insulators (TCIs) were recently predicted in thin films of the SnTe class of IV-VI semiconductors, which can host metallic edge states protected by mirror symmetry. As thickness decreases, quantum confinement effect will increase and surpass the inverted gap below a critical thickness, turning TCIs into normal insulators. Surprisingly, based on first...

The electronic properties of cation radical salts derived from organometallic mixed-ligand complexes [(ppy)Au(S-S)](ppy- = C-dehydro-2-phenylpyridine(-); S-S(2-) = dithiolene ligand) with Au(III)-C sigma-bond were investigated. A 2:1 salt complex [(ppy)Au(C8H4S8)]2[PF6] (C8H4S8(2-) = 2-((4,5-ethylenedithio)-1,3-dithiole-2-ylidene)-1,3-dithiole-4,5-dithiolate(2-)) exhibited semiconductive behavi...

Fe1-xO wüstite as negative electrode material for Li-ion batteries has been studied. The aim of this work is to get a better understanding of the insertion mechanism involved during reduction/oxidation processes. Electrochemical tests have been done in Swagelock TM cells and shown a high specific capacity of 800 Ah/kg for the first discharge. X-ray diffraction and 57 Fe Mössbauer spectroscopy p...

We report on a comprehensive study of the ZnSe(100)-c(232)-Na interface using x-ray and UV photoemission, and x-ray-induced Auger spectroscopy. Spectra were taken after stepwise Na deposition onto a clean c(232)-reconstructed ZnSe~100! surface at room temperature up to a saturation coverage of about 1 ML of Na and after annealing. Based on the analysis of Auger parameters and of the relative in...

The influence of NaCl, KCl, CaCl2, and MgCl2 on the binding of prolactin (PRL) to its receptor was investigated. The salts were dissolved in a metallic ion-free binding buffer and had biphasic effects on changes in the association rate constant (k+1) of PRL binding, depending on their concentrations: there was an increase in the k+1 at lower concentrations and a decrease at higher concentration...