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Important questions are emerging about potential occupational safety, toxicological, and ecotoxicological effects and occupational inhalation exposure risks to engineered aerosol nanoparticles. Although multiple avenues are available to synthesize nanoparticles, few tools are accessible to industrial hygienists and inhalation toxicologists to produce well-characterized aerosols of known aerosol size distribution and particle number concentration that are stable, simple, and robust to operate. This article describes a SiO(2) aerosol nanoparticle reactor that has been developed as a tool for the study of the safety, health, and environmental consequences of exposure to nanoparticle synthesis and processing. The SiO(2) aerosol nanoparticle reactor is capable of stable, long-term synthesis of amorphous SiO(2) aerosol nanoparticles from d(50) = 10-70 nm at particle concentrations approximately 10(4)-10(7)particles/cm(3) that does not produce halogen-containing byproducts and does not require daily monitoring of the particle size distribution. This reactor is designed to produce a well-characterized aerosol to enable subsequent testing with a continuous, stable supply of aerosol nanoparticles (i) to facilitate inhalation toxicology studies, (ii) to measure explosion characteristics of aerosol nanoparticles, (iii) to determine the barrier efficacy for respirator filtration, bag house exhaust, and personal protective garment media challenged with diverse aerosol nanoparticles, and (iv) to develop airborne monitoring technologies for verifying workplace safety protocols. This article details reactor design, synthesis parameters, and instruments available to characterize the resulting aerosol nanoparticle size distributions.

Field-driven phase transitions generally arise from competition between Zeeman energy and exchange or crystal-field anisotropy. Here we present the phase diagram of a frustrated pyrochlore magnet Gd(2)Ti(2)O(7), where crystal-field splitting is small compared to the dipolar energy. We find good agreement between zero-temperature critical fields and those obtained from a mean-field model. Here, dipolar interactions couple real space and spin space, so the transitions in Gd(2)Ti(2)O(7) arise from field-induced "cooperative anisotropy," reflecting the broken spatial symmetries of the pyrochlore lattice.

The fullerene C(60) can be converted into two different structures by high pressure and temperature. They are metastable and revert to pristine C(60) on reheating to 300 degrees C at ambient pressure. For synthesis temperatures between 300 degrees and 400 degrees C and pressures of 5 gigapascals, a nominal face-centered-cubic structure is produced with a lattice parameter a(o) = 13.6 angstroms. When treated at 500 degrees to 800 degrees C at the same pressure, C(60) transforms into a rhombohedral structure with hexagonal lattice parameters of a(o) = 9.22 angstroms and c(o) = 24.6 angstroms. The intermolecular distance is small enough that a chemical bond can form, in accord with the reduced solubility of the pressure-induced phases. Infrared, Raman, and nuclear magnetic resonance studies show a drastic reduction of icosahedral symmetry, as might occur if the C(60) molecules are linked.

Single-crystal epitaxial thin films of the isotropic metallic oxides Sr1-xCaxRuO(3) (0