Search

The effect of solar irradiation on plasmonic silver nanocrystals has been investigated using transmission electron microscopy and size distribution analysis, in the context of solar cell applications for light harvesting. Starting from an initial collection of spherical nanocrystals on a carbon film whose sizes are log-normally distributed, solar irradiation causes the nanocrystals to grow, with one particle reaching a diameter of 638 nm after four hours of irradiation. In addition some of the larger particles lose their spherical shape. The average nanocrystal diameter was found to grow as predicted by the Ostwald ripening model, taking into account the range of area fractions of the samples. The size distribution stays approximately log-normal and does not reach one of the steady-state size distributions predicted by the Ostwald ripening model. This might be explained by the system being in a transient state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Silver nanocrystals made by a chemical reduction of silver salts (AgNO3) by sodium borohydride (NaBH4) were studied using transmission electron microscopy and light scattering simulations. For various AgNO3/NaBH4 molar ratios, the size distributions of the nanocrystals were found to be approximately log-normal. In addition, a linear relation was found between the mean nanocrystal size and the molar ratio. In order to relate the size distribution of Ag nanocrystals of the various molar ratios to the scattering properties of Ag nanocrystals in solar cell devices, light scattering simulations of Ag nanocrystals in Si, SiO2, SiN, and Al2O3 matrices were carried out using MiePlot. These light scattering spectra for the individual nanocrystal sizes were combined into light scattering spectra for the fitted size distributions. The evolution of these scattering spectra with respect to an increasing mean nanocrystal size was then studied. From these findings, it is possible to find the molar ratio for which the corresponding nanocrystal size distribution has maximum scattering at a particular wavelength in the desired matrix. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, advances in machine learning algorithms, cheap computational resources, and the availability of big data have spurred the deep learning revolution in various application domains. In particular, supervised learning techniques in image analysis have led to a superhuman performance in various tasks, such as classification, localization, and segmentation, whereas unsupervised learning techniques based on increasingly advanced generative models have been applied to generate high-resolution synthetic images indistinguishable from real images. In this letter, we consider a state-of-the-art machine learning model for image inpainting, namely, a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network based on a fully convolutional architecture with a contextual attention mechanism. We show that this model can be successfully transferred to the setting of digital elevation models for the purpose of generating semantically plausible data for filling voids. Training, testing, and experimentation are done on GeoTIFF data from various regions in Norway, made openly available by the Norwegian Mapping Authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For the space of $$C^3$$ quintics on the Powell-Sabin 12-split of a triangle, we determine explicitly the six symmetric simplex spline bases that reduce to a B-spline basis on each edge and have a positive partition of unity, a Marsden identity that splits into real linear factors, and an intuitive domain mesh. The bases are stable in the $$L_\infty $$ norm with a condition number independent of the geometry and have a well-conditioned Lagrange interpolant at the domain points and a quasi-interpolant with local approximation order 6. We show an $$h^2$$ bound for the distance between the control points and the values of a spline at the corresponding domain points. For one of these bases, we derive $$C^0$$ , $$C^1$$ , $$C^2$$ , and $$C^3$$ conditions on the control points of two splines on adjacent macrotriangles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]