It is often stated that formation of a functional solid electrolyte interphase (SEI) in sodium ion batteries is hampered by the higher solubility of SEI components such as sodium salts in comparison ...to the lithium analogues. In order to investigate these phenomena, SEI formation and functionality, as well as cell self-discharge, are studied for the sodium ion system with comparative experiments on the equivalent lithium ion system. By conducting a set of experiments on carbonaceous anodes, the impact of SEI dissolution is tested. The results show that the SEI layer in sodium ion cells is inferior to that in lithium ion counterparts with regards to self-discharge; sodium cells show a loss in capacity at a dramatic rate as compared to the lithium counterparts when they are stored at sodiated and lithiated states, respectively, for a long time with no external applied current or potential. Also, synchrotron-based hard X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy measurements indicate that the major factor leading to increased self-discharge is dissolution of significant parts of the sodium-based SEI. Furthermore, the influence of fluoroethylene carbonate (FEC) electrolyte additive on self-discharge is tested as part of the work.
As the use of digitalization and automated decision-making becomes more common in the public sector, civil servants and clients find themselves in an environment where automation and robot technology ...can be expected to make dramatic changes. Social service delivery in Trelleborg, Sweden, is the setting for a case study of the goals, policies, procedures, and responses to a change in how social assistance is delivered using automated decision-making. Interviews with politicians and professionals complemented with government documents and reports provide the empirical data for the analysis. Four value positions: Professionalism, Efficiency, Service, and Engagement, are used as the analytical framework. The findings reveal that the new technology in some respects has increased accountability, decreased costs, and enhanced efficiency, in association with a focus on citizen centricity. While the findings establish a congruence among instances of some value positions, a divergence is observed among others. Examples of divergence are professional knowledge vs. automated treatment, a decrease in costs vs. the need to share costs, and citizen trust vs. the lack of transparency. The study confirms the power of applying the value positions lens in e-Government research.
•The focus is on digitalization and automated decision-making in public social services.•Automated decision-making could enhance accountability and trust and reduce costs.•However, automated decision-making could increase certain control features and decrease transparency.•A listing of General and Context-Specific divergent values is provided.•The study confirms the strength of applying the value positions lens in research.
The widespread design of covalent drugs has focused on crafting reactive groups of proper electrophilicity and positioning toward targeted amino-acid nucleophiles. We found that environmental ...electric fields projected onto a reactive chemical bond, an overlooked design element, play essential roles in the covalent inhibition of TEM-1 β-lactamase by avibactam. Using the vibrational Stark effect, the magnitudes of the electric fields that are exerted by TEM active sites onto avibactam’s reactive CO were measured and demonstrate an electrostatic gating effect that promotes bond formation yet relatively suppresses the reverse dissociation. These results suggest new principles of covalent drug design and off-target site prediction. Unlike shape and electrostatic complementary which address binding constants, electrostatic catalysis drives reaction rates, essential for covalent inhibition, and deepens our understanding of chemical reactivity, selectivity, and stability in complex systems.
The Forward Physics Facility (FPF) is a proposal to create a cavern with the space and infrastructure to support a suite of far-forward experiments at the Large Hadron Collider during the High ...Luminosity era. Located along the beam collision axis and shielded from the interaction point by at least 100 m of concrete and rock, the FPF will house experiments that will detect particles outside the acceptance of the existing large LHC experiments and will observe rare and exotic processes in an extremely low-background environment. In this work, we summarize the current status of plans for the FPF, including recent progress in civil engineering in identifying promising sites for the FPF and the experiments currently envisioned to realize the FPF’s physics potential. We then review the many Standard Model and new physics topics that will be advanced by the FPF, including searches for long-lived particles, probes of dark matter and dark sectors, high-statistics studies of TeV neutrinos of all three flavors, aspects of perturbative and non-perturbative QCD, and high-energy astroparticle physics.
Here, we describe the third major release of RELION. CPU-based vector acceleration has been added in addition to GPU support, which provides flexibility in use of resources and avoids memory ...limitations. Reference-free autopicking with Laplacian-of-Gaussian filtering and execution of jobs from python allows non-interactive processing during acquisition, including 2D-classification,
model generation and 3D-classification. Per-particle refinement of CTF parameters and correction of estimated beam tilt provides higher resolution reconstructions when particles are at different heights in the ice, and/or coma-free alignment has not been optimal. Ewald sphere curvature correction improves resolution for large particles. We illustrate these developments with publicly available data sets: together with a Bayesian approach to beam-induced motion correction it leads to resolution improvements of 0.2-0.7 Å compared to previous RELION versions.
We have deposited polycrystalline Re-doped (Fe65Co35)(100−x)Rex (0≤x≤12.6 at. %) thin films grown under identical conditions and sandwiched between thin layers of Ru in order to study the phenomenon ...of spin pumping as a function of Re concentration. In-plane and out-of-plane ferromagnetic resonance spectroscopy results show an enhancement of the Gilbert damping with an increase in Re doping. We find 98% enhancement in the real part of effective spin mixing conductance Re(geff↑↓) with Re doping. Conversely, the Re(geff↑↓) does not change with Re doping in Fe65Co35 thin films which are seeded and capped with Cu layers. The enhancement in Re(geff↑↓) of Re-doped Fe65Co35 thin films sandwiched between thin layers of Ru is linked to the Re doping-induced change of the interface electronic structure in the nonmagnetic Ru layer. The saturation magnetization decreases 35% with increasing Re doping up to 12.6 at. %. This study opens a direction of tuning the spin mixing conductance in magnetic heterostructures by doping of the ferromagnetic layer, which is essential for the realization of energy-efficient operation of spintronic devices.
The chemical stability of the Li-O 2 battery components (cathode and electrolyte) in contact with lithiumperoxide (Li 2 O 2 ) was investigated using X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS). XPS is a ...versatile method to detect amorphous as well as crystalline decomposition products of both salts and solvents. Two strategies were employed. First, cathodes including carbon, α‑MnO 2 catalyst, and Kynar binder (PVdF-HFP) were exposed to Li 2 O 2 and LiClO 4 in propylenecarbonate (PC) or (tetraethylene glycol dimethyl ether) TEGDME electrolytes. The results indicated that Li 2 O 2 degrades TEGDME to carboxylate containing species and that the decomposition products in turn degraded the Kynar binder. The α‑MnO 2 catalyst was unaffected. Second, Li 2 O 2 model surfaces were kept in contact with different electrolytes to investigate the chemical stability, and also the resulting surface layer on Li 2 O 2 . Further, the XPS experiments revealed that the Li salts LiPF 6 , LiBF 4 , and LiClO 4 decomposed to form LiF or LiCl together with P-O or B-O bond containing compounds when exposed to Li 2 O 2 . PC decomposed to carbonate and ether based species. The degradation of the electrolytes increased from short to long exposure time indicating that the surface layer on Li 2 O 2 became thicker by increasing time. Overall, it was shown that a mixture of ethylene carbonate and diethyl carbonate (EC/DEC) is more robust in contact with Li 2 O 2 compared to PC.
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