The lipid-based bicontinuous cubic mesophase is a nanoporous membrane mimetic with applications in areas that include medicine, personal care products, foods and the basic sciences. An application of particular note concerns it use as a medium in which to grow crystals of membrane proteins for structure determination by X-ray crystallography. At least two variations of the mesophase exist. One ...

The zinc nitrate salt acts as a solvent in the ZnX-C(12)EO(10) (ZnX is [Zn(H(2)O)(6)](NO(3))(2) and C(12)EO(10) is C(12)H(25)(OCH(2)CH(2))(10)OH) lyotropic liquid crystalline (LLC) mesophase with a drastic dropping on the melting point of ZnX. The salt-surfactant LLC mesophase is stable down to -52 °C and undergoes a phase change into a solid mesostructured salt upon cooling below -52 °C; no ph...

Lipids have been widely used as main constituents in various drug delivery systems, such as liposomes, solid lipid nanoparticles, nanostructured lipid carriers, and lipid-based lyotropic liquid crystals. Among them, lipid-based lyotropic liquid crystals have highly ordered, thermodynamically stable internal nanostructure, thereby offering the potential as a sustained drug release matrix. The in...

The microscopic mechanism leading to stabilization of cubic and tetragonal forms of zirconia (ZrO2) is analyzed by means of a self-consistent tight-binding model. Using this model, energies and structures of zirconia containing different vacancy concentrations are calculated, equivalent in concentration to the charge compensating vacancies associated with dissolved yttria (Y2O3) in the tetragon...

Metallo-dielectric photonic crystals with cubic symmetries have been studied here both experimentally and theoretically in the millimeter wavelength region (15-60 mm). In a direct analogy to linear systems, we considered the three-dimensional lattices as a stack of two-dimensional resonating screens. The overall three-dimensional structure was introduced in the calculation through a structural ...

The simple cubic phase of a RbC60 thin film has been studied using photoelectron spectroscopy. The simple cubic-to-dimer transition is found to be reversible at the film surface. A sharp Fermi edge is observed and a lower limit of 0.5 eV is found for the surface Hubbard U, pointing to a strongly correlated metallic character of thin-film simple cubic RbC60. A molecular charge state is identifie...

Theoretical analysis and Lorentz transmission electron microscopy (LTEM) investigations in an FeGe wedge demonstrate that chiral twists arising near the surfaces of noncentrosymmetric ferromagnets [Meynell et al., Phys. Rev. B 90, 014406 (2014)] provide a stabilization mechanism for magnetic Skyrmion lattices and helicoids in cubic helimagnet nanolayers. The magnetic phase diagram obtained for ...

Lyotropic liquid crystal systems, such as reversed bicontinuous cubic and hexagonal mesophases, are attracting more and more attention because of their unique microstructures and physicochemical properties. Various bioactive molecules such as chemical drugs, peptides and proteins can be solubilized in either aqueous or oil phase and be protected from hydrolysis or oxidation. Furthermore, severa...

Formation of stray grain defects particularly around re-entrant features of the turbine blade airfoils is one of the major problems in directional and single crystal solidification processes. In this work, directional solidification tests of the GTD-111 Ni-based superalloy were conducted at different withdrawal velocities of 3, 6 and 9 mm.min-1 using various stepped cylindrical and cubic design...

This article investigates the possibility and convenience of a filtering operation in the joint time/chirp-rate (TCR) domain, and proposes a novel linear TCR filter for decomposing multicomponent signals into their quadratic and/ or cubic phase chirp components with monotonic instantaneous chirp-rate (ICR) laws only. The TCR domain mask of the filter is selected on a display of a TCR representa...