Gold embrittlement of solder joints has been written about for at least four decades [1 – 3]. Nevertheless, gold embrittlement related solder joint failures have been analyzed in this laboratory as recently as July 2009. Gold embrittlement can be avoided by careful solder joint design and knowledge of the causes of this condition. The purpose of this paper is to provide a detailed account of ma...

Metal ceramic partial fixed dental prostheses have been commonly used for the replacement of missing teeth for many years. Because of an increase in the price of gold, base metal alloys have been the choice of alloy for the fabrication of metal ceramic restorations in many dental clinics. Some major disadvantages of base metals are their corrosion and the dark coloration they may cause at the c...

This paper reports the design, fabrication, packaging, and testing of a relay-type threshold accelerometer array. The array includes 15 different sense elements ranging from 10 to 150 g in 10 g increments, and triply redundant 20 and 100 g sense elements for a total of 19 elements. The devices were fabricated using a modified sacrificial LIGA technique that creates a 100–300 m thick nickel stru...

Flavour changing neutral decays of the top quark are know to be extremely suppressed in the SM. This is especially so for the top quark decay into the SM Higgs boson, whose rate is less than 10. However, it turns out that the decay modes t → c h, with h ≡ h, H, A any of the MSSM neutral Higgs bosons, can be much more gifted. In particular, the rate into the lightest CP-even Higgs boson h – whic...

In this talk we survey the SSC and LHC signals and backgrounds for the physics of electroweak symmetry breaking. We study the process pp → WWX and compute the rate for the “gold-plated” signals W → lν and Z → ll (l = e, μ) for a wide variety of models. We use a forward jet tag and central jet veto to suppress the standard-model backgrounds. In this way we estimate the SSC and LHC sensitivities ...

We study the uncertainties of the standard model (SM) predictions for CP violating B decays and investigate where and how supersymmetric (SUSY) contributions may be disentangled. The first task is accomplished by letting the relevant matrix elements of the effective Hamiltonian vary within certain ranges. The SUSY analysis makes use of a formalism which allows one to obtain model-independent re...