In engineering practice, slots of different shapes and orientations are made with a view to satisfy the functional requirements. The presence of slots increases the complexity of the analysis (by stress concentration) of structural members/elements. Studies have been commonly done on plain concrete slab with rectangular and circular opening, while only few studies have been done on slots of lar...

We demonstrate that bowtie apertures can be used for contact lithography to achieve nanometer scale resolution. The bowtie apertures with a 30 nm gap size are fabricated in aluminum thin films coated on quartz substrates. Lithography results show that holes of sub-50-nm dimensions can be produced in photoresist by illuminating the apertures with a 355 nm laser beam polarized in the direction ac...

Two methods can be used to suppress multipacting in a rectangular coupler waveguide. The slotted waveguide method calls for opening slots on the broad walls in the wave propagation direction that perturb the resonance and trap multipacting electrons. The DC magnetic bias method utilizes a solenoid coil wrapped around the waveguide to generate a mild DC magnetic field in the waveguide space that...

This reaffirmation of teachers has been a leading factor in the development of recent strategies for school improvement The reports by the Carnegie Task Force and the Holmes Group are two prominent examples of proposals aimed specifically at problems within the teaching profession. These reports are significant in that they have helped place teaching squarely at the center of current educationa...

To obtain a more human-like interaction with technical systems, those have to be adaptable to the users individual preferences, and current emotional state. In human-human interaction the behaviour of the speaker is characterised by semantic and prosodic cues, given (among other indicators) as short feedback signals. These so called filled pauses minimally convey certain dialogue functions such...

We revisit the far from equilibrium escape problem across a fluctuating potential barrier that is driven by asymmetric, unbiased dichotomous noise. Our closed analytical solution for arbitrary noise strengths reveals new aspects of the so-called ‘‘resonant-activation’’ effect and leads to interesting implications regarding far from equilibrium or externally controlled chemical reaction processe...