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Zinc alloys are recognised for their excellent biocompatibility and favourable corrosion rates, making them suitable for bioabsorbable implants. However, their mechanical properties necessitate improvement to fulfil the rigorous requirements of biomedical applications. This research focuses on engineering pseudo-harmonic structures within zinc alloys through a comprehensive method combining mechanical alloying, spark plasma sintering, and hot extrusion techniques. This fabrication process results in a composite material characterised by a soft core surrounded by a continuous, three-dimensional, ultrafine-grained hard shell. The experiment involved blending pure zinc with Zn-1Mg alloy powder, leading to the formation of both ductile zinc and fine-grained Zn-1Mg regions. While the Mg2Zn11 intermetallic phase was found to enhance the alloy's mechanical strength, the presence of oxide shells adversely affected the material's properties. The elimination of these shells via hot extrusion markedly improved the alloy's tensile strength, reaching an average value of tensile strength of 333 MPa. This study provides significant insights into the material engineering of zinc-based alloys for biodegradable implant applications, demonstrating a viable approach to optimising their mechanical performance., Comment: paper preprint

Scan line levelling, a ubiquitous and often necessary step in AFM data processing, can cause a severe bias on measured roughness parameters such as mean square roughness or correlation length. Although bias estimates have been formulated, they aimed mainly at assessing the severity of the problem for individual measurements. Practical bias correction methods are still missing. This work exploits the observation that the bias of autocorrelation function (ACF) can be expressed in terms of the function itself, permitting a self-consistent formulation. From this two correction approaches are developed, both with the aim to obtain convenient formulae which can be easily applied in practice. The first modifies standard analytical models of ACF to incorporate, in expectation, the bias and thus actually match the data the models are used to fit. The second inverts the relation between true and estimated ACF to realise a model-free correction. Both are tested using simulated and experimental data and found effective., Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures

The RF plasma slit jet, which produces 150 mm wide streaming plasma outside the jet body, exhibits exciting self-organization phenomena that resemble the self-organized patterns of dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) filaments. Similarly, as in DBD, the filaments are surrounded by an inhibition zone that does not allow two filaments to come closer to each other. With fast camera imaging, we observed the filamentary character of the discharge in all the studied gas feeds (Ar, Ar/N$_2$, and Ar/O$_2$). Still, the visual appearance of the filaments in the plasma and their interaction with a dielectric surface depended significantly on the gas feed. As the breakdown voltage in pure Ar is relatively low compared to the applied one, new filaments form frequently. Such newly created filaments disrupted the characteristic inter-filament distance, forcing the system to rearrange. The frequent ignition and decay processes in Ar led to short filament lifetimes (0.020-0.035 s) and their high jitter speed (0.9-1.7 m/s), as determined with an image processing custom code based on Gwyddion libraries. The number of filaments was lower in the Ar/O$_2$ and Ar/N$_2$ mixtures. It was attributed to a loss of energy in the excitation of rotational and vibrational levels and oxygen electronegativity. Since the probability of low-current side discharges transitioning into the full plasma filaments was limited in the gas mixtures, the self-organized pattern was seldom disrupted, leading to lesser movement and longer lifetimes. Unlike in Ar or Ar/O$_2$, the constricted filaments in Ar/N$_2$ were surrounded by diffuse plasma plumes, likely connected to the presence of long-lived nitrogen species. We demonstrated in the polypropylene treatment that the self-organization phenomena affected the treatment uniformity., Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, submitted to Plasma Sources Science and Technology

Periodic structures are often found in various areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology with many of them being used for metrological purposes either to calibrate instruments, or forming the basis of measuring devices such as encoders. Evaluating the period of one or two-dimensional periodic structures from topography measurements, e.g. performed using scanning probe microscopy (SPM) methods, can be achieved using different methodologies with many grating evaluation methods having been proposed in the past and applied to a handful of examples. The optimum methodology for determining the grating pitch is not immediately obvious. This paper reports the results of extensive large-scale simulations and analysis to evaluate the performance of both direct and Fourier space data processing methods. Many thousands of simulations have been performed on a variety of different gratings under different measurement conditions and including the simulation of defects encountered in real life situations. The paper concludes with a summary of the merits and disadvantages of the methods together with practical recommendations for the measurements of periodic structures and for developing algorithms for processing them., Comment: 34 pages, 11 figures, to be submitted to Measurement Science and Technology

When measuring the roughness of rough surfaces, the limited sizes of scanned areas lead to its systematic underestimation. Levelling by polynomials and other filtering used in real-world processing of atomic force microscopy data increases this bias considerably. Here a framework is developed providing explicit expressions for the bias of squared mean square roughness in the case of levelling by fitting a model background function using linear least squares. The framework is then applied to polynomial levelling, for both one-dimensional and two-dimensional data processing, and basic models of surface autocorrelation function, Gaussian and exponential. Several other common scenarios are covered as well, including median levelling, intermediate Gaussian--exponential autocorrelation model and frequency space filtering. Application of the results to other quantities, such as Rq, Sq, Ra and~Sa is discussed. The results are summarized in overview plots covering a range of autocorrelation functions and polynomial degrees, which allow graphical estimation of the bias., Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures, submitted to Measurement Science and Technology, special issue Nanoscale 2019

We report on optical properties of various polymorphs of hafnia predicted within the framework of density functional theory. The full potential linearised augmented plane wave method was employed together with the Tran-Blaha modified Becke-Johnson potential for exchange and local density approximation for correlation. Unit cells of monoclinic, cubic, and tetragonal crystalline, and a simulated annealing-based model of amorphous hafnia were fully relaxed with respect to internal positions and lattice parameters. The thus obtained band gaps of 5.76 eV, 5.88 eV, 6.54 eV, and 5.5 eV for monoclinic, cubic, tetragonal, and amorphous hafnia, respectively, are in excellent agreement with available experimental data. Dielectric functions were calculated and a shift of spectral weights to higher energies with respect to experimental data was predicted. This was attributed to the random phase approximation used to calculate the dielectric function, rather than inaccuracies in the band structure., Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 2 tables