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The room temperature growth, characterization, and electrical transport properties of magnetron sputtered superconducting Ti40V60 alloy thin films are presented. The films exhibit low surface roughness and tunable transport properties. As the sputtering current increases, the superconducting transition move towards higher temperatures. Rietveld refinement of two dimensional XRD (2D XRD) pattern reveals the presence of stress in the films, which shifts from tensile to compressive as the sputtering current increases. Additionally, the crystallite size of the films increases with higher sputtering currents. The films exhibit a strong preferential orientation, contributing to their texturing. The crystallite size and texturing are found to be correlated with the superconducting transition temperature (TC) of the films. As the crystallite size and texturing increase, the TC of the films also rises.

In this article we report the structural stability of Er$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ cubic pyrochlore with pressure using x-ray diffraction, Raman spectroscopy, photoluminescence, x-ray absorption and ab-initio calculations. Our studies establish a phase transformation in Er$_2$Ti$_2$O$_7$ from ambient cubic phase to high-pressure orthorhombic (cotunnite) phase, initiated at ~40 GPa. The transformation is sluggish and it does not complete even at the highest measured pressure in our study i.e. ~60.0 GPa. This is further supported by the first principle calculations which reveal that cotunnite phase is energetically more stable than the ambient phase above ~53 GPa. After complete release of pressure, the high-pressure cotunnite phase is retained while the fraction of untransformed pyrochlore phase becomes amorphous. Furthermore, the EXAFS data of the recovered sample at L3 edge of Er3+ ion show an increase in the coordination number of cations from eight at ambient to nine in the high-pressure phase. The mechanism of structural transformation is explained in terms of accumulation of cation antisite defects and subsequent disordering of cations and anions in their respective sublattice. The amorphization of the pyrochlore phase upon release is interpreted as the inability of accommodating the point defects at ambient conditions, which are formed in the pyrochlore lattice under compression.

Plastic strain-induced phase transformations (PTs) and chemical reactions under high pressure are broadly spread in modern technologies, friction and wear, geophysics, and astrogeology. However, because of very heterogeneous fields of plastic strain $\mathbf{E}^{p}$ and stress $\mathbf{\sigma}$ tensors and volume fraction $c$ of phases in a sample compressed in a diamond anvil cell (DAC) and impossibility of measurements of $\mathbf{\sigma}$ and $\mathbf{E}^{p}$, there are no strict kinetic equations for them. Here, we develop combined experimental-computational approaches to determine all fields in strongly plastically predeformed Zr and kinetic equation for $\alpha$-$\omega$ PT consistent with experimental data for the entire sample. Kinetic equation depends on accumulated plastic strain (instead of time) and pressure and is independent of plastic strain and deviatoric stress tensors, i.e., it can be applied for various above processes. Our results initiate kinetic studies of strain-induced PTs and provide efforts toward more comprehensive understanding of material behavior in extreme conditions., Comment: 28 pages, 11 figures

High-pressure synchrotron X-ray diffraction (XRD) studies have been conducted on three types of Si particles (micron, 100 nm, and 30 nm). The pressure for initiation of Si-I->Si-II phase transformation (PT) essentially increases with a reduction in particle size. For 30 nm Si particles, Si-I directly transforms to Si-XI by skipping the intermediate Si-II phase, which appears during the pressure release. The evolution of phase fractions of Si particles under hydrostatic compression is studied. The equation of state (EOS) of Si-I, Si-II, Si-V, and Si-XI for all three particle sizes is determined, and the results are compared with other studies. A simple iterative procedure is suggested to extract the EOS of Si-XI and Si-II from the data for a mixture of two and three phases with different pressures in each phase. Using previous atomistic simulations, EOS for Si-II is extended to ambient pressure, which is important for plastic strain-induced phase transformations. Surprisingly, the EOS of micron and 30 nm Si are identical, but different from 100 nm particles. In particular, the Si-I phase of 100 nm Si is less compressible than that of micron and 30 nm Si. The reverse Si-V->Si-I PT is observed for the first time after complete pressure release to the ambient for 100 nm particles., Comment: 19 pages, 10 figures, 2 tables

In situ studies under severe plastic deformation at high pressures, employing rotational/shear diamond anvil cells (RDAC), have recently gained much interest in the high-pressure community owing to their potential applications in material processing methods, mechanochemistry, geophysics, etc. These studies, combined with multi-scale computational simulations, provide important insights into the transient hierarchical microstructural evolution, structural phase transitions, and orientation relationship between parent and daughter phases and help establish the kinetics of strain-induced phase transitions under severe plastic deformation. Existing RDACs are mostly used in axial x-ray diffraction geometry due to geometrical constraints providing less reliable information about stress states and texture. Their asymmetric design also poses serious limitations to high-pressure shear studies on single crystals. To overcome these limitations, a new compact symmetric rotational diamond anvil cell has been designed and developed for in situ high-pressure torsion studies on materials. The symmetric angular opening and short working distance in this new design help obtain a more reliable crystallographic orientation distribution function and lattice strain states up to a large Q range. Here, we present the advantages of the symmetric design with a few demonstrative studies.

Pressure-induced phase transformations (PTs) between numerous phases of Si, the most important electronic material, have been studied for decades. This is not the case for plastic strain-induced PTs. Here, we revealed in-situ various unexpected plastic strain-induced PT phenomena. Thus, for 100 nm Si, strain-induced PT Si-I to Si-II (and Si-I to Si-III) initiates at 0.4 GPa (0.6 GPa) versus 16.2 GPa ($\infty$, since it does not occur) under hydrostatic conditions; for 30 nm Si, it is 6.1 GPa versus $\infty$. The predicted theoretical correlation between the direct and inverse Hall-Petch effect of the grain size on the yield strength and the minimum pressure for strain-induced PT is confirmed for the appearance of Si-II. Retaining Si-II at ambient pressure and obtaining reverse Si-II to Si-I PT are achieved, demonstrating the possibilities of manipulating different synthetic paths., Comment: 26 pages, 10 figures

The first study of the effect of the initial microstructure on its evolution under hydrostatic compression before, during, and after the irreversible $\alpha\rightarrow\omega$ phase transformation and during pressure release in Zr using in situ x-ray diffraction is presented. Two samples were studied: one is plastically pre-deformed Zr with saturated hardness and the other is annealed. Phase transformation $\alpha\rightarrow\omega$ initiates at lower pressure for the pre-deformed sample but above volume fraction of $\omega$ Zr $c= 0.7$, a larger volume fraction is observed for the annealed sample. This implies that the general theory based on the proportionality between the athermal resistance to the transformation and the yield strength must be essentially advanced. The crystal domain size significantly reduces, and microstrain and dislocation density increase during loading for both $\alpha$ and $\omega$ phases in their single-phase regions. For the $\alpha$ phase, domain sizes are much smaller for prestrained Zr, while microstrain and dislocation densities are much higher. Despite the generally accepted concept that hydrostatic pressure does not cause plastic straining, it does and is estimated. The microstructure is not inherited during phase transformation. The significant evolution of the microstructure and its effect on phase transformation demonstrates that their postmortem evaluation does not represent the actual conditions during loading. A simple model for the initiation of the phase transformation involving microstrain is suggested. The results suggest that an extended experimental basis is required for the predictive models for the combined pressure-induced phase transformations and microstructure evolutions.

Various phenomena (phase transformations, chemical reactions, and friction) under high pressures in diamond anvil cell are strongly affected by fields of all components of stress and plastic strain tensors. However, they could not be measured. Even measured pressure distribution contains significant error. Here, we suggest coupled experimental-analytical-computational approaches utilizing synchrotron X-ray diffraction, to solve an inverse problem and find all these fields and friction rules before, during, and after $\alpha$-$\omega$ phase transformation in strongly plastically predeformed Zr. Due to advanced characterization, the minimum pressure for the strain-induced $\alpha$-$\omega$ phase transformation is changed from 1.36 to 2.7 GPa. It is independent of the compression-shear path. The theoretically predicted plastic strain-controlled kinetic equation is verified and quantified. Obtained results open opportunities for developing quantitative high-pressure/stress science, including mechanochemistry, material synthesis, and tribology., Comment: 45 pages

The natural kinship between classical theories of interpolation and approximation is well explored. In contrast to this, the interrelation between interpolation and approximation is subtle and this duality is relatively obscure in the context of fractal interpolation. The notion of $\alpha$-fractal function provides a proper foundation for the approximation theoretic facet of univariate fractal interpolation functions (FIFs). However, no comparable approximation theoretic aspects of FIFs has been developed for functions of several variables. The current article intends to open the door for intriguing interaction between approximation theory and multivariate FIFs. To this end, in the first part of this article, we develop a general framework to construct multivariate FIF, which is amenable to provide a multivariate analogue of the $\alpha$-fractal function. Multivariate $\alpha$-fractal functions provide a parameterized family of fractal approximants associated to a given multivariate continuous function. Some elementary aspects of the multivariate fractal nonlinear (not necessarily linear) interpolation operator that sends a continuous function defined on a hyper-rectangle to its fractal analogue is studied., Comment: This paper is submitted to a journal for possible publication

We provide a general framework to construct fractal interpolation surfaces (FISs) for a prescribed countably infinite data set on a rectangular grid. Using this as a crucial tool, we obtain a parameterized family of bivariate fractal functions simultaneously interpolating and approximating a prescribed bivariate continuous function. Some elementary properties of the associated nonlinear (not necessarily linear) fractal operator are established, thereby initiating the interaction of the notion of fractal interpolation with the theory of nonlinear operators., Comment: 21 Pages. Submitted to a Journal for Possible Publication in July 2020

We measure the resonant forward scattering of light by a highly saturated atomic medium through the flashes emitted immediately after an abrupt extinction of the probe beam. The experiment is done in a dilute regime where the phenomena are well captured using the independent scattering approximation. Comparing our measurements to a model based on Maxwell-Bloch equations, our experimental results are consistent with contributions from only the elastic component, whereas the attenuation of the coherent transmission power is linked to the elastic and inelastic scatterings. In the large saturation regime and at the vicinity of the atomic resonance, we derive an asymptotic expression relating the elastic scattering power to the forward-scattered power., Comment: 11 pages, 4 figures

We report the fabrication and characterization of gate-defined hole quantum dots in monolayer and bilayer WSe$_2$. The devices were operated with gates above and below the WSe$_2$ layer to accumulate a hole gas, which for some devices was then selectively depleted to define the dot. Temperature dependence of conductance in the Coulomb blockade regime is consistent with transport through a single level, and excited state transport through the dots was observed at temperatures up to 10 K. For adjacent charge states of a bilayer WSe$_2$ dot, magnetic field dependence of excited state energies was used to estimate $g$-factors between 0.8 and 2.4 for different states. These devices provide a platform to evaluate valley-spin states in monolayer and bilayer WSe$_2$ for application as qubits.

The first in situ quantitative synchrotron X-ray diffraction (XRD) study of plastic strain-induced phase transformation (PT) has been performed on $\alpha-\omega$ PT in ultra-pure, strongly plastically predeformed Zr as an example, under different compression-shear pathways in rotational diamond anvil cell (RDAC). Radial distributions of pressure in each phase and in the mixture, and concentration of $\omega$-Zr, all averaged over the sample thickness, as well as thickness profile were measured. The minimum pressure for the strain-induced $\alpha-\omega$ PT, $p^d_{\varepsilon}$=1.2 GPa, is smaller than under hydrostatic loading by a factor of 4.5 and smaller than the phase equilibrium pressure by a factor of 3; it is independent of the compression-shear straining path. The theoretically predicted plastic strain-controlled kinetic equation was verified and quantified; it is independent of the pressure-plastic strain loading path and plastic deformation at pressures below $p^d_{\varepsilon}$. Thus, strain-induced PTs under compression in DAC and torsion in RDAC do not fundamentally differ. The yield strength of both phases is estimated using hardness and x-ray peak broadening; the yield strength in shear is not reached by the contact friction stress and cannot be evaluated using the pressure gradient. Obtained results open a new opportunity for quantitative study of strain-induced PTs and reactions with applications to material synthesis and processing, mechanochemistry, and geophysics.