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Abstract Many patients who underwent hepatic percutaneous microwave ablation (MWA) reported experiencing pain during the procedure. This study utilized a well-designed multicentral, randomized, and placebo-controlled format to investigate the effects of Butorphanol. Patients who underwent MWA were randomly assigned to either Butorphanol or normal saline group. The primary outcomes of the study were assessed by measuring the patients' intraoperative pain levels using a 10-point visual analog scale (VAS). Secondary outcomes included measuring postoperative pain levels at the 6-h mark (VAS) and evaluating comprehensive pain assessment outcomes. A total of 300 patients were divided between the control group (n = 100) and the experimental group (n = 200). Butorphanol showed statistically significant reductions in intraoperative pain levels compared to the placebo during surgery (5.00 ± 1.46 vs. 3.54 ± 1.67, P

Abstract The interplay between magnetism and electronic band topology enriches topological phases and has promising applications. However, the role of topology in magnetic fluctuations has been elusive. Here, we report evidence for topology stabilized magnetism above the magnetic transition temperature in magnetic Weyl semimetal candidate CeAlGe. Electrical transport, thermal transport, resonant elastic X-ray scattering, and dilatometry consistently indicate the presence of locally correlated magnetism within a narrow temperature window well above the thermodynamic magnetic transition temperature. The wavevector of this short-range order is consistent with the nesting condition of topological Weyl nodes, suggesting that it arises from the interaction between magnetic fluctuations and the emergent Weyl fermions. Effective field theory shows that this topology stabilized order is wavevector dependent and can be stabilized when the interband Weyl fermion scattering is dominant. Our work highlights the role of electronic band topology in stabilizing magnetic order even in the classically disordered regime.

The size of transistors has drastically reduced over the years. Interconnects have likewise also been scaled down. Today, conventional copper (Cu)-based interconnects face a significant impediment to further scaling since their electrical conductivity decreases at smaller dimensions, which also worsens the signal delay and energy consumption. As a result, alternative scalable materials such as semi-metals and 2D materials were being investigated as potential Cu replacements. In this paper, we experimentally showed that CoPt can provide better resistivity than Cu at thin dimensions and proposed hybrid poly-Si with a CoPt coating for local routing in standard cells for compactness. We evaluated the performance gain for DRAM/eDRAM, and area vs. performance trade-off for D-Flip-Flop (DFF) using hybrid poly-Si with a thin film of CoPt. We gained up to a 3-fold reduction in delay and a 15.6% reduction in cell area with the proposed hybrid interconnect. We also studied the system-level interconnect design using NbAs, a topological semi-metal with high electron mobility at the nanoscale, and demonstrated its advantages over Cu in terms of resistivity, propagation delay, and slew rate. Our simulations revealed that NbAs could reduce the propagation delay by up to 35.88%. We further evaluated the potential system-level performance gain for NbAs-based interconnects in cache memories and observed an instructions per cycle (IPC) improvement of up to 23.8%.

Theories predict a large thermopower and a quantized thermoelectric Hall conductivity in topological semimetals. Here, the authors observe an ultrahigh longitudinal thermopower and a giant power factor attributed to the quantized thermoelectric Hall effect in a Weyl semimetal TaP.

Brain disorders such as brain tumors and neurodegenerative diseases (NDs) are accompanied by chemical alterations in the tissues. Early diagnosis of these diseases will provide key benefits for patients and opportunities for preventive treatments. To detect these sophisticated diseases, various imaging modalities have been developed such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET). However, they provide inadequate molecule-specific information. In comparison, Raman spectroscopy (RS) is an analytical tool that provides rich information about molecular fingerprints. It is also inexpensive and rapid compared to CT, MRI, and PET. While intrinsic RS suffers from low yield, in recent years, through the adoption of Raman enhancement technologies and advanced data analysis approaches, RS has undergone significant advancements in its ability to probe biological tissues, including the brain. This review discusses recent clinical and biomedical applications of RS and related techniques applicable to brain tumors and NDs.

Graphene is a two-dimensional (2D) material consisting of a single sheet of sp2 hybridized carbon atoms laced in a hexagonal lattice, with potentially wide usage as a Raman enhancement substrate, also termed graphene-enhanced Raman scattering (GERS), making it ideal for sensing applications. GERS improves upon traditional surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS), combining its single-molecule sensitivity and spectral fingerprinting of molecules, and graphene’s simple processing and superior uniformity. This enables fast and highly sensitive detection of a wide variety of analytes. Accordingly, GERS has been investigated for a wide variety of sensing applications, including chemical- and bio-sensing. As a derivative of GERS, the use of two-dimensional materials other than graphene for Raman enhancement has emerged, which possess remarkably interesting properties and potential wider applications in combination with GERS. In this review, we first introduce various types of 2D materials, including graphene, MoS2, doped graphene, their properties, and synthesis. Then, we describe the principles of GERS and comprehensively explain how the GERS enhancement factors are influenced by molecular and 2D material properties. In the last section, we discuss the application of GERS in chemical- and bio-sensing, and the prospects of such a novel sensing method.