Hf-Ni alloys are studied as a gate electrode for metal-oxide-semiconductor devices. The Hf-Ni solid-state amorphization couple encompasses several metallurgical phenomena which are investigated at the nanoscale and are correlated with the macroscopic electrical properties of devices. The dependence of the Fermi level position on the alloy composition is studied both on SiO2 and on HfO2. In orde...

Fish farm sediments receive a large amount of organic matter from uneaten food and fecal material. This nutrient enrichment, or organic pollution, causes the accumulation of sulphide in the sediment from the action of sulphate-reducing bacteria (SRB). We investigated the effect of organic enrichment around coastal fish farms comparing the SRB community structure in these sediments. Sediment sam...

For diffusion flames, the combination of oxygen enrichment and fuel dilution results in an increase in the stoichiometric mixture fraction, Zst, and alters the flame structure, i.e., the relationship between the local temperature and the local gas composition. Increasing Zst has been shown to result in the reduction or even elimination of soot. In the present work, the effects of variable Zst o...

We consider 400 H ii galaxies in which the oxygen abundances were obtained by electron temperature based methods. We split the sample in three metallicity bins. In each bin, a narrow sequence is found not only in pure emission line ratio diagrams but also in terms of Hβ equivalent width, indicating the existence of an evolutionary sequence. Our diagrams show unambiguously the existence of an ev...

Strained oxide thin films are of interest for accelerating oxide ion conduction in electrochemical devices. Although the effect of elastic strain has been uncovered theoretically, the effect of dislocations on the diffusion kinetics in such strained oxides is yet unclear. Here we investigate a 1/2<110>{100} edge dislocation by performing atomistic simulations in 4-12% doped CeO2 as a model fast...

A combination of SEM, AES and angle-resolved XPS (ARXPS) has been applied to analyse the distribution of chemical compounds in the surface region of electrochemically etched molybdenum tips and to determine the contamination layer thickness. Carbon monoxide, graphite, molybdenum carbide and molybdenum oxide were found to be the main surface contaminants on molybdenum tips. Auger line profiling ...

Power generation in microbial fuel cells implemented in constructed wetlands (CW-MFCs) is low despite the enrichment of anode electricigens most closely related to Geobacter lovleyi. Using the model representative G. lovleyi strain SZ, we show that acetate, but not formate or lactate, can be oxidized efficiently but growth is limited by the high sensitivity of the bacterium to oxygen. Acetate a...