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The phenomenon of superconductivity continues to be of considerable scientific and practical interest. Underlying this phenomenon is the formation of electron pairs, which in conventional superconductors do not rotate about their centre of mass (‘s -wave’ pairing; refs 1, 2). This contrasts with the situation in high-temperature superconductors, where the electrons in a pair are believed to have two units of relative angular momentum (‘d -wave’ pairing; ref. 3 and references therein). Here we report small-angle neutron-scattering measurements of magnetic flux lines in the perovskite superconductor Sr2RuO4 (ref. 4), which is a candidate for another unconventional paired electron state—‘p -wave’ pairing, which has one unit of angular momentum5,6,7. We find that the magnetic flux lines form a square lattice over a wide range of fields and temperatures, which is the result predicted by a recent theory8,9 of p -wave superconductivity in Sr2RuO4. This theory also indicates that only a fraction of the electrons are strongly paired and that the orientation of the square flux lattice relative to the crystal lattice will determine which parts of the three-sheet Fermi surface of this material are responsible for superconductivity. Our results suggest that superconductivity resides mainly on the ‘γ’ sheet9.

The authors developed a new I/O network based on the TCnet technology which is standardized as IEC 61784-2 CPF11. This new network that is called TC-net I/O Loop has redundancy and reliability in addition to real-time and deterministic features which TCnet has, and its transmission control is realized by original medium access methodology based on the TCnet technology. In this article, we summarize the features of TCnet, and introduce the characteristics and redundancy technology of TC-net I/O Loop.

The hemodynamic effects of enalapril, an angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitor, BQ-123, a selective ETA receptor antagonist, and bosentan, a nonselective ETA and ETB receptor antagonist, were studied in dogs 4 weeks after myocardial infarction (MI) produced by ligation of the left anterior descending coronary artery. Reduced arterial pressure and total peripheral resistance after administration of analapril, BQ-123, and bosentan revealed that both the renin-angiotensin system and endothelin participate in maintenance of cardiovascular function in chronic MI.

In recent years, the technology called "Industrial Ethernet" in consideration of the problems such as real-time and high reliability, is developed to apply the lower price and higher speed Ethernet technologies to the controller networks in the measurement and control systems. At present, in IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission), the standardization working of "Real-Time Ethernet (RTE)" is progressed. Compared with existing Industrial Ethernet, it is a remarkable feature that RTE has the mechanism which synchronizes the timing between each node, and enables deterministic communication (synchronization accuracy between each node is defined in the specifications). In this paper, we update the latest information on the RTE international standardization, and introduce the performance indicators defined by the standard. Furthermore, we explain the technical trend regarding time synchronization and high availability by redundancy, and then we introduce the outline regarding the RTE specifications. Recently it is important that the specification which might become "De-facto Standard" is internationally standardized and turns into "De-jure Standard" promptly. It will also become very important to watch the trend of international0 standardization in the future, in order to research the trend of the latest technology.

In ground testing of a spacecraft system, a simulator system which emulates a micro-gravity environment is necessary. It is demanded that the simulator system has wide response frequency bandwidth when dealing with motions having contacts and collisions. The authors have been developing a hybrid micro-gravity simulator which has a wide response bandwidth. Its motion table is a high-speed parallel robot driven by powerful direct drive motors. In preliminary experiments, this robot has achieved accelerations up to 40 (G). In this paper, we report an outline of the simulator and discuss the experimental results obtained.

We have studied the AC susceptibility of Sr2RuO4. We detected a peculiar feature near Hc2 for Hdc||ab-plane, which is correlated with the in-plane Hc2 anisotropy. Both this feature and the magnitude of Hc2 anisotropy are severely suppressed with the field misalignment of less than 1°. This fact supports that a new superconducting state with a line-node gap exists at higher fields near Hc2.

Nature 396, 242–245 (1998) In this Letter, the X-ray Laue patterns used to give the orientation of our crystal were misinterpreted by 45°. With the magnetic field perpendicular to the RuO2 planes, the nearest-neighbour directions in the square flux-line lattice (FLL) are actually at 45° to the Ru–O–Ru directions in the crystal lattice.