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    Guidance of mesenchymal stem cells on fibronectin structured hydrogel films
    (San Francisco, California, US : PLOS, 2014) Kasten, Annika; Naser, Tamara; Brüllhoff, Kristina; Fiedler, Jörg; Müller, Petra; Möller, Martin; Rychly, Joachim; Groll, Jürgen; Brenner, Rolf E.; Engler, Adam J.
    Designing of implant surfaces using a suitable ligand for cell adhesion to stimulate specific biological responses of stem cells will boost the application of regenerative implants. For example, materials that facilitate rapid and guided migration of stem cells would promote tissue regeneration. When seeded on fibronectin (FN) that was homogeneously immmobilized to NCO-sP(EO-stat-PO), which otherwise prevents protein binding and cell adhesion, human mesenchymal stem cells (MSC) revealed a faster migration, increased spreading and a more rapid organization of different cellular components for cell adhesion on fibronectin than on a glass surface. To further explore, how a structural organization of FN controls the behavior of MSC, adhesive lines of FN with varying width between 10 µm and 80 µm and spacings between 5 µm and 20 µm that did not allow cell adhesion were generated. In dependance on both line width and gaps, cells formed adjacent cell contacts, were individually organized in lines, or bridged the lines. With decreasing sizes of FN lines, speed and directionality of cell migration increased, which correlated with organization of the actin cytoskeleton, size and shape of the nuclei as well as of focal adhesions. Together, defined FN lines and gaps enabled a fine tuning of the structural organization of cellular components and migration. Microstructured adhesive substrates can mimic the extracellular matrix in vivo and stimulate cellular mechanisms which play a role in tissue regeneration.
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    Influence of diluted acid mixtures on selective etching of MHz- and kHz-fs-laser inscribed structures in YAG
    (Washington, DC : OSA, 2021) Hasse, Kore; Kip, Detlef; Kränkel, Christian
    We show that the inscription velocity of fs-laser written structures in YAG crystals can be significantly improved by the use of MHz repetition rates for the writing process. Using a 10 MHz inscription laser, record high writing velocities up to 100 mm/s are achieved. Also, the selective etching process is accelerated using a diluted mixture of 22% H3PO4 and 24% H2SO4. The diluted mixture enables selective etching of up to 9.6 mm long, 1 µm wide and 18 µm high microchannels in 23 days. The etching parameter D of 11.2 µm2/s is a factor of 3 higher than previously reported and the selectivity is even increased by an order of magnitude.
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    Ultrafast inter-ionic charge transfer of transition-metal complexes mapped by femtosecond x-ray powder diffraction
    (Les Ulis : EDP Sciences, 2013) Zamponi, F.; Freyer, B.; Juvé, V.; Stingl, J.; Woerner, M.; Chergui, M.; Elsaesser, T.
    Transient electron density maps are derived from x-ray diffraction patterns of photoexcited [Fe(bpy)3]2+(PF6 -)2 powder. Upon photoexcitation, the 5T 2 quintet state reveals a charge transfer from the PF 6- ions and from the Fe atoms to neighboring bpy units. The charge transfer from the Fe points to a partial and weak charge-transfer character of this state.
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    Batch and continuous lactic acid fermentation based on a multi-substrate approach
    (Basel : MDPI AG, 2020) Olszewska-Widdrat, Agata; Alexandri, Maria; López-Gómez, José Pablo; Schneider, Roland; Venus, Joachim
    The utilisation of waste materials and industrial residues became a priority within the bioeconomy concept and the production of biobased chemicals. The aim of this study was to evaluate the feasibility to continuously produce L-lactic acid from different renewable substrates, in a multi-substrate strategy mode. Based on batch experiments observations, Bacillus coagulans A534 strain was able to continuously metabolise acid whey, sugar beet molasses, sugar bread, alfalfa press green juice and tapioca starch. Additionally, reference experiments showed its behaviour in standard medium. Continuous fermentations indicated that the highest productivity was achieved when molasses was employed with a value of 10.34 g·L−1·h−1, while the lactic acid to sugar conversion yield was 0.86 g·g−1 . This study demonstrated that LA can be efficiently produced in continuous mode regardless the substrate, which is a huge advantage in comparison to other platform chemicals. © 2020 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
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    Modelling the role of fires in the terrestrial carbon balance by incorporating SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE - Part 1: Simulating historical global burned area and fire regimes
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2014) Yue, C.; Ciais, P.; Cadule, P.; Thonicke, K.; Archibald, S.; Poulter, B.; Hao, W.M.; Hantson, S.; Mouillot, F.; Friedlingstein, P.; Maignan, F.; Viovy, N.
    Fire is an important global ecological process that influences the distribution of biomes, with consequences for carbon, water, and energy budgets. Therefore it is impossible to appropriately model the history and future of the terrestrial ecosystems and the climate system without including fire. This study incorporates the process-based prognostic fire module SPITFIRE into the global vegetation model ORCHIDEE, which was then used to simulate burned area over the 20th century. Special attention was paid to the evaluation of other fire regime indicators such as seasonality, fire size and fire length, next to burned area. For 2001–2006, the simulated global spatial extent of fire agrees well with that given by satellite-derived burned area data sets (L3JRC, GLOBCARBON, GFED3.1), and 76–92% of the global burned area is simulated as collocated between the model and observation, depending on which data set is used for comparison. The simulated global mean annual burned area is 346 Mha yr−1, which falls within the range of 287–384 Mha yr−1 as given by the three observation data sets; and is close to the 344 Mha yr−1 by the GFED3.1 data when crop fires are excluded. The simulated long-term trend and variation of burned area agree best with the observation data in regions where fire is mainly driven by climate variation, such as boreal Russia (1930–2009), along with Canada and US Alaska (1950–2009). At the global scale, the simulated decadal fire variation over the 20th century is only in moderate agreement with the historical reconstruction, possibly because of the uncertainties of past estimates, and because land-use change fires and fire suppression are not explicitly included in the model. Over the globe, the size of large fires (the 95th quantile fire size) is underestimated by the model for the regions of high fire frequency, compared with fire patch data as reconstructed from MODIS 500 m burned area data. Two case studies of fire size distribution in Canada and US Alaska, and southern Africa indicate that both number and size of large fires are underestimated, which could be related with short fire patch length and low daily fire size. Future efforts should be directed towards building consistent spatial observation data sets for key parameters of the model in order to constrain the model error at each key step of the fire modelling.
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    Complex refractive indices of Saharan dust samples at visible and near UV wavelengths: A laboratory study
    (München : European Geopyhsical Union, 2012) Wagner, R.; Ajtai, T.; Kandler, K.; Lieke, K.; Linke, C.; Müller, T.; Schnaiter, M.; Vragel, M.
    We have retrieved the wavelength-dependent imaginary parts of the complex refractive index for five different Saharan dust aerosol particles of variable mineralogical composition at wavelengths between 305 and 955 nm. The dust particles were generated by dispersing soil samples into a laboratory aerosol chamber, typically yielding particle sizes with mean diameters ranging from 0.3 to 0.4 μm and maximum diameters from 2 to 4 μm. The extinction and absorption coefficients as well as the number size distribution of the dust particles were simultaneously measured by various established techniques. An inversion scheme based on a spheroidal dust model was employed to deduce the refractive indices. The retrieved imaginary parts of the complex refractive index were in the range from 0.003 to 0.005, 0.005 to 0.011, and 0.016 to 0.050 at the wavelengths 955, 505, and 305 nm. The hematite content of the dust particles was determined by electron-microscopical single particle analysis. Hematite volume fractions in the range from 1.1 to 2.7% were found for the different dusts, a range typical for atmospheric mineral dust. We have performed a sensitivity study to assess how accurately the retrieved imaginary refractive indices could be reproduced by calculations with mixing rule approximations using the experimentally determined hematite contents as input.
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    Probing Oxide Reduction and Phase Transformations at the Au-TiO2 Interface by Vibrational Spectroscopy
    (Bussum : Baltzer, 2017-8-17) Pougin, Anna; Lüken, Alexander; Klinkhammer, Christina; Hiltrop, Dennis; Kauer, Max; Tölle, Katharina; Havenith-Newen, Martina; Morgenstern, Karina; Grünert, Wolfgang; Muhler, Martin; Strunk, Jennifer
    By a combination of FT-NIR Raman spectroscopy, infrared spectroscopy of CO adsorption under ultrahigh vacuum conditions (UHV-IR) and Raman spectroscopy in the line scanning mode the formation of a reduced titania phase in a commercial Au/TiO2 catalyst and in freshly prepared Au/anatase catalysts was detected. The reduced phase, formed at the Au-TiO2 interface, can serve as nucleation point for the formation of stoichiometric rutile. TinO2n−1 Magnéli phases, structurally resembling the rutile phase, might be involved in this process. The formation of the reduced phase and the rutilization process is clearly linked to the presence of gold nanoparticles and it does not proceed under similar conditions with the pure titania sample. Phase transformations might be both thermally or light induced, however, the colloidal deposition synthesis of the Au/TiO2 catalysts is clearly ruled out as cause for the formation of the reduced phase.
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    Application of Matched-Filter Concepts to Unbiased Selection of Data in Pump-Probe Experiments with Free Electron Lasers
    (Basel : MDPI, 2017-06-16) Callegari, Carlo; Takanashi, Tsukasa; Fukuzawa, Hironobu; Motomura, Koji; Iablonskyi, Denys; Kumagai, Yoshiaki; Mondal, Subhendu; Tachibana, Tetsuya; Nagaya, Kiyonobu; Nishiyama, Toshiyuki; Matsunami, Kenji; Johnsson, Per; Piseri, Paolo; Sansone, Giuseppe; Dubrouil, Antoine; Reduzzi, Maurizio; Carpeggiani, Paolo; Vozzi, Caterina; Devetta, Michele; Faccialà, Davide; Calegari, Francesca; Castrovilli, Mattea; Coreno, Marcello; Alagia, Michele; Schütte, Bernd; Berrah, Nora; Plekan, Oksana; Finetti, Paola; Ferrari, Eugenio; Prince, Kevin; Ueda, Kiyoshi
    Pump-probe experiments are commonly used at Free Electron Lasers (FEL) to elucidate the femtosecond dynamics of atoms, molecules, clusters, liquids and solids. Maximizing the signal-to-noise ratio of the measurements is often a primary need of the experiment, and the aggregation of repeated, rapid, scans of the pump-probe delay is preferable to a single long-lasting scan. The limited availability of beamtime makes it impractical to repeat measurements indiscriminately, and the large, rapid flow of single-shot data that need to be processed and aggregated into a dataset, makes it difficult to assess the quality of a measurement in real time. In post-analysis it is then necessary to devise unbiased criteria to select or reject datasets, and to assign the weight with which they enter the analysis. One such case was the measurement of the lifetime of Intermolecular Coulombic Decay in the weakly-bound neon dimer. We report on the method we used to accomplish this goal for the pump-probe delay scans that constitute the core of the measurement; namely we report on the use of simple auto- and cross-correlation techniques based on the general concept of “matched filter”. We are able to unambiguously assess the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of each scan, which then becomes the weight with which a scan enters the average of multiple scans. We also observe a clear gap in the values of SNR, and we discard all the scans below a SNR of 0.45. We are able to generate an average delay scan profile, suitable for further analysis: in our previous work we used it for comparison with theory. Here we argue that the method is sufficiently simple and devoid of human action to be applicable not only in post-analysis, but also for the real-time assessment of the quality of a dataset.
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    Research Update: Van-der-Waals epitaxy of layered chalcogenide Sb2Te3 thin films grown by pulsed laser deposition
    (Melville, NY : AIP Publ., 2017) Hilmi, Isom; Lotnyk, Andriy; Gerlach, Jürgen W.; Schumacher, Philipp; Rauschenbach, Bernd
    An attempt to deposit a high quality epitaxial thin film of a two-dimensionally bonded (layered) chalcogenide material with van-der-Waals (vdW) epitaxy is of strong interest for non-volatile memory application. In this paper, the epitaxial growth of an exemplary layered chalcogenide material, i.e., stoichiometric Sb2Te3 thin films, is reported. The films were produced on unreconstructed highly lattice-mismatched Si(111) substrates by pulsed laser deposition (PLD). The films were grown by vdW epitaxy in a two-dimensional mode. X-ray diffraction measurements and transmission electron microscopy revealed that the films possess a trigonal Sb2Te3 structure. The single atomic Sb/Te termination layer on the Si surface was formed initializing the thin film growth. This work demonstrates a straightforward method to deposit vdW-epitaxial layered chalcogenides and, at the same time, opens up the feasibility to fabricate chalcogenide vdW heterostructures by PLD.
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    The spin-flip scattering effect in the spin transport in silicon doped with bismuth
    (Bristol : IOP Publ., 2017) Ezhevskii, A.A.; Detochenko, A.P.; Soukhorukov, A.V.; Guseinov, D.V.; Kudrin, A.V.; Abrosimov, N.V.; Riemann, H.
    Spin transport of conduction electrons in silicon samples doped with bismuth in the 1.1•1013 - 7.7•1015 cm-3 concentration range was studied by the Hall effect measurements. The dependence of the Hall voltage magnitude on the magnetic field is the sum of the normal and spin Hall effects. The electrons are partially polarized by an external magnetic field and are scattered by the bismuth spin-orbit potential. Spin-flip scattering results in the additional electromotive force which compensates the normal Hall effect in strong magnetic fields.