The KEPLER transit survey with follow-up spectroscopic observations has discovered numerous small planets (super-Earths/sub-Neptunes) and revealed intriguing features of their sizes, orbital periods, and their relations between adjacent planets. The planet size distribution exhibits a bimodal distribution separated by a radius gap at around 1.8 Earth radii. Besides, these small planets within multiple planetary systems show that adjacent planets are similar in size and their period ratios of adjacent planet pairs are similar as well, a phenomenon often dubbed as peas-in-a-pod in the exoplanet community. While the radius gap has been predicted and theorized for years, whether it can be relevant to the orbital architecture peas-in-a-pod is physically unknown. For the first time, we attempted to model both features together through planet formation and evolution processes involving giant impacts and photoevaporation. We showed that our model is generally consistent with the KEPLER results but with a smaller radius gap. The impact of Kubyshikina’s model for photoevaporation on our model is discussed.

Perovskite type oxide thin films have attracted a lot of attention, because they are essential materials which will be used for various electric devices such as ferroelectric random access memory (FeRAM) and tunable filter devices. When the materials are used for such capacitive devices, bottom electrode layers for oxide films are very important, since they significantly affect the crystallinity of the oxide films. Platinum (Pt) is one of the well known bottom electrode materials used for the oxide thin films. Pt provides also better nucleation sites for such perovskite materials due to small lattice misfit. Since dielectric properties of ferroelectric films are originated from the displacement of ions in a crystal along the c-axis direction, c-axis oriented ferroelectric thin films are required to attain better dielectric properties. (100) oriented Pt layers are required to attain c-axis oriented perovskite type ferroelectric films. In our previous report, we succeeded in preparing (100)-oriented Pt thin films with thickness of 20 nm on SiO2/Si substrate at substrate temperature Ts above 400 °C using MgO (100) buffer layers which deposited on Fe (100) seed layers. However, the growth of Pt(111) texture appeared when the thickness was increased from 20 nm to 100 nm, since (100) texture has relatively higher surface energy than (111) closely packed texture for Pt surface. It suggested that surface energy of the films changed during the deposition. In order to keep the surface energy, addition of O2 gas was performed during Pt deposition. Pt thin films with (100) preferred orientation with thickness above 100 nm were deposited on the (100) oriented MgO layer prepared on very thin seed Fe layers deposited on SiO2/Si substrates at Ts of 500 °C by facing-targets sputtering. It was also succeeded to attain (100) oriented perovskite oxide layer when they were deposited on the Pt(100)/Mg(100)/Fe/SiO2/Si underlayer.

Numerical analysis of the kinetics in an e-beam excited KrF laser medium demonstrates the feasibility of a compact KrF fusion driver operating at high intensity (∼100MW/cm2) and intrinsic efficiency (∼20%) in a Kr/F2 mixture. Some primitive concepts of KrF fusion driver modules are discussed.

Broad-band random-phase (BRP) irradiation is one of the beam smoothing techniques for KrF laser drivers. We have introduced this technique into the KrF laser system ASHURA. By one-dimensional (ID) BRP smoothing, the speckle pattern in conventional random-phase irradiation has been removed. Two BRP beams were overlap-focused on the target incoherently. Although the obtained profile is rather smooth, some low-frequency nonuniformity remains. To improve the uniformity, a new technique for two-dimensional (2D) smoothing has been proposed. In this technique, a wedged etalon is used to get angular dispersion to the orthogonal direction to the ID BRP effect. The preliminary experiment has been carried out.

Local electronic structures of C60-Co hybrid films have been studied by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and near-edge X-ray absorption fine structure (NEXAFS) spectroscopy. XPS spectra of C 1s main and satellite peaks for the C60-Co films show binding-energy shifts and also line-broadening compared to those in a pure C60 film. In addition, XPS spectra in valence band region suggest an appearance of three new components at near Fermi level and HOMO level in the C60-Co film. These results are attributed to hybridizations between Co 3d band and C60 LUMO. The same effects have been observed in NEAXFS spectra at C 1s excitations.

High-throughput experimentation is effective in systematically producing large and diverse data sets. The marriage of combinatorial materials science and informatics is a natural one, and results are beginning to emerge from the integration of elements of materials informatics with data from combinatorial libraries. We discuss data management issues in high-throughput experimentation and highlight recent examples where data-mining tools are being implemented for extracting knowledge and predicting new compounds, with an emphasis on electronic materials.

Organic thin film devices are of interest for a variety of forthcoming ubiquitous electronics applications. In order to build ubiquitous high-performance devices, it is necessary to fabricate crystalline thin films of various organic materials onto “ubiquitous substrates” that are dictated by applications. However, many organic thin films crystallize only on a limited selection of substrates. Unfortunately, promising organic molecules, which have a large overlap of pi-orbitals between molecules, cannot migrate freely on a substrate because of stronger cohesion between molecules than interaction between the molecule and the substrate. Therefore, enhancement of the molecule-substrate interaction, i.e. ‘molecular wettability’ should promote crystallization. We found that an ultrasmooth monolayer of pentacene (C22H14), which can be grown on many general dielectric substrates, changes the molecular wettability of a substrate for other poorly wettable organic materials. We also demonstrate that a field effect transistor (FET) using a crystalline C60 thin film on a pentacene-buffered substrate can have a mobility of 4.9 cm2/Vs, which is 5-fold higher than that of C60 FETs without the buffer. Molecular wetting-controlled substrates can thus offer a general solution to the fabrication of high-performance crystalline plastic and molecular electronics.

We have fabricated C60 thin films on various substrates (mica, MoS2, HOPG, LiF, NaCl, KBr, KCl and CaF2) by using continuous-wave laser molecular beam epitaxy (CWL-MBE), which is very suitable technique to grow epitaxial organic thin films because of good controllability of evaporation as compared with Knudsen-cell method. The films were evaluated by reflection high-energy electron diffraction with micro channel imaging plate (MCP-RHEED) and atomic force microscopy (AFM). AFM images of the C60 films on mica, MoS2 and HOPG substrates show flat and homogeneous, morphology, and epitaxial growth of the films on mica and MoS2 substrates were observed by RHEED. This result shows mica, MoS2, HOPG substrates are good candidates for epitaxial growth of C60 thin films.

Combinatorial pulsed laser deposition approach is suitable to study complex effects such as composition, thickness and surface structure on thin film-based photocatalysis in high-throughput manner. We fabricated composition spreads and thickness gradient films of transition metal-doped SrTiO3(001) on various oxide single crystal substrates and evaluated their photocatalytic activity by the use of photoreduction of Ag+ in AgNO3 solution. We found anomalous film thickness and substrate effects on the Ag-photodeposition in the V-doped SrTiO3 epitaxial thin films grown on the Nb:SrTiO3(001) substrate.

We developed a variable-temperature scanning microwave microscope (VT-SμM) that can perform high-throughput materials characterization in the temperature range between 4K and room temperature. As a sensor probe we used a high-Q coaxial cavity resonator, which was mounted on the low-temperature stage to allow variable-temperature measurements. We carried out systematic studies on the thermal degradation of the conducting polymers using the combinatorial libraries of polyaniline and polythiophene thin films, which showed rapid decrease of conductivity above 300C and 250C, respectively. The low-temperature performance of the VT-SμM was demonstrated by the measurement of composition-spread Nd1-xSrxMnO3 thin film, for which we succeeded in detecting the clear metal-insulator transition at 100K. We also propose a simple and easy method for the quantitative analysis of conductive thin films, by using the standard composition-spread thin films of Ti1-xNbxO2.

We explored a new fluid flux stabilized even in the vacuum condition at high temperature by combinatorial pulsed laser deposition (PLD) approach. A small amount of CuO doped in BiOx was found to effectively stabilize BiOx even in 6 Torr O2 at 800°C. The application of this novel Bi-Cu-O flux to the vacuum process lead to the successful fabrication of a single crystal Bi4Ti3O12 film and the establishment of a more reliable process for preparation of an atomically flat LaAlO3(001) substrate.

The statistical induction of stochastic context free grammars from bracketed corpora with the Inside Outside Algorithm is an appealing method for grammar learning, but the computational complexity of this algorithm has made it impossible to generate a large scale grammar. Researchers from natural language processing and speech recognition have suggested various methods to reduce the computational complexity and, at the same time, guide the learning algorithm towards a solution by, for example, placing constraints on the grammar. We suggest a method that strongly reduces that computational cost of the algorithm without placing constraints on the grammar. This method can in principle be combined with any of the constraints on grammars that have been suggested in earlier studies. We show that it is feasible to achieve results equivalent to earlier research, but with much lower computational effort. After creating a small grammar, the grammar is incrementally increased while rules that have become obsolete are removed at the same time. We explain the modifications to the algorithm, give results of experiments and compare these to results reported in other publications.

Our aim was to determine the effect of growth hormone on non-insulin-mediated glucose disposal in lactating dairy cows. Following 5 d of subcutaneous injections of either saline or growth hormone, insulin, somatostatin or insulin plus somatostatin were infused for 2 h each, in a series of experiments. Coincident with this, unlabelled glucose was infused at a variable rate to maintain a constant plasma glucose concentration. Glucose, doubly labelled with deuterium, was also infused for the calculations of glucose turnover. Plasma insulin levels were reduced to nearly zero by the infusion of somatostatin; under such conditions whole body glucose disposal should be non-insulin-mediated. Dairy cows treated with growth hormone, which had significantly increased milk yields on the day before the experimental infusions, did not have different levels of whole body non-insulin-mediated glucose disposal when expressed in absolute terms. Growth hormone did not affect non-mammary non-insulin-mediated glucose uptake estimated by calculation. Growth hormone significantly inhibited insulin-mediated glucose uptake when plasma insulin levels were elevated. Glucose uptake during insulin plus somatostatin infusion was not significantly different from that of the insulin only infusion.

It has been found that when Cu atoms are deposited on a p(2×l)-O Ag(ll0) surface, a (2×2)p2mg LEED pattern appears. The STM image has proved that zig-zag (-Cu-O-) strings grow along the [110] direction on Ag(ll0) (Fig. I)1, where a chemical reaction of (-Ag-O-) + Cu => (-Cu-O-) + Ag take place. The (-Cu-O-) strings grown on a Ag(l10) surface shows a unique reversible reaction given by an equation of (Cu)6+O2⇄ (-Cu-O-) at 570K. In this paper, we studied the bond property, the growth mechanism and electric structure of the (-Cu-O-) strings on Ag(ll0) by using XPS, HREELS and ARUPS as well as STM.

As increasing the deposition of Cu atoms on a p(2×l)-O Ag(l10) surface, the O(ls) peak in the XPS shifted from 528.2 eV to 529.9 eV(Fig. 2a). An energy loss peak at 41meV being assignable to (Ag-O) bond disappeared and a new loss peak concomitantly appeared at 35 meV in the HREELS (Fig. 2b).