When two surfaces at two different temperatures are separated by a distance comparable to a mean-free path of the molecules of the ambient medium, the surfaces experience Knudsen force. This mechanical force can be important in microelectromechanical systems and in atomic force microscopy. A theoretical discussion of the magnitude of the forces and the conditions where they can be encountered i...

The roughness of glass surfaces after different stages of etching is investigated by reflection measurements with a spectrophotometer, light scattering, and atomic-force microscopy (in small scale), and Talysurf (in large scale). The results suggest, there are three regimes during etching, according to their optical reflectivity and roughness. The first and second regimes are studied by the Kir...

Ni-Mn-Ga is a ferromagnetic shape memory alloy that deforms by twin boundary motion. The magneto-mechanical properties depend strongly on the twin microstructure. A thermomechanical treatment was applied to a Ni-Mn-Ga single crystal with coexisting 10M and 14M martensite structures to create twin boundaries and align the short crystallographic c direction preferentially perpendicular to the sur...

Constraints for the constants of hypothetical Yukawa-type corrections to the Newtonian gravitational potential are obtained from analysis of neutron scattering experiments. Restrictions are obtained for the interaction range between 10 −12 and 10 −7 cm, where Casimir force experiments and atomic force microscopy are not sensitive. Experimental limits are obtained also for non-electromagnetic in...

This paper investigates the use of partial replication in the Database State Machine approach introduced earlier for fully replicated databases. It builds on the order and atomicity properties of group communication primitives to achieve strong consistency and proposes two new abstractions: Resilient Atomic Commit and Fast Atomic Broadcast. Even with atomic broadcast, partial replication requir...

Atomic force microscopes typically require knowledge of the cantilever spring constant and optical lever sensitivity in order to accurately determine the force from the cantilever deflection. In this study, we investigate a technique to calibrate the optical lever sensitivity of rectangular cantilevers that does not require contact to be made with a surface. This noncontact approach utilizes th...