Abstract. Iron oxide compounds constitute an important component of mineral dust aerosols. Several previous studies have shown that these minerals are strong absorbers at visible wavelengths and thus that they play a critical role in the overall climate perturbation caused by dust aerosols. When compiling a database of complex refractive indices of possible mineral species of iron oxides to study their optical properties, we found that uniformly continuous optical constants for a single type of iron oxide in the wavelength range between 0.2 and 50 μm are very scarce, and that the use of hematite to represent all molecular or mineral iron-oxides types is a popular hypothesis. However, the crucial problem is that three continuous data sets for complex refractive indices of hematite are employed in climate models, but there are significant differences between them. Thus, the real role of iron oxides in the optical properties of dust aerosols becomes a key scientific question, and we address this problem by considering different refractive indices, size distributions and more logical weight fractions and mixing states of hematite. Based on the microscopic observations, a semi-external mixture that employs an external mixture between Fe aggregates and other minerals and partly internal mixing between iron oxides and aluminosilicate particles is advised as the optimal approximation. The simulations demonstrate that hematite with a spectral refractive index from Longtin et al. (1988) shows approximately equal absorbing capacity to the mineral illite over the whole wavelength region from 0.55 to 2.5 μm, and only enhances the optical absorption of aerosol mixture at λ < 0.55 μm. Using the data set from Querry (1985) may overestimate the optical absorption of hematite at both visible and near-infrared wavelengths. More laboratory measurements of the refractive index of iron oxides, especially for hematite and goethite in the visible spectrum, should therefore be taken into account when assessing the effect of mineral dust on climate forcing.

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Corona cooling was detected previously from stacking a series of short type I bursts that occurred during the low/hard state of an atoll outburst. Type I bursts are hence regarded as sharp probes used to better our understanding of the basic properties of the corona. The first Chinese X-ray satellite, Insight-HXMT, has a large detection area at hard X-rays that provides a unique opportunity to move further in this research field. We report the first detection of corona cooling by Insight-HXMT from a single short type I burst appearing during the flare of 4U 1636-536. This type I X-ray burst has a duration of ∼13 s and hard X-ray shortage is detected with a significance of 6.2σ in 40–70 keV. A cross-correlation analysis between the light curves of the soft and hard X-ray band shows that the corona shortage lags the burst emission by 1.6 ± 1.2 s. These results are consistent with those derived previously from stacking a large amount of bursts detected by RXTE/PCA within a series of flares of 4U 1636-536. Moreover, the broad bandwidth of Insight-HXMT also allows, for the first time, one to infer the burst influence upon the continuum spectrum via performing the spectral fitting of the burst, which points to the finding that hard X-ray shortage appears at around 40 keV in the continuum spectrum. These results suggest that the evolution of the corona, along with the outburst/flare of NS XRB, may be traced via analyzing a series of embedded type I bursts using Insight-HXMT.

We here report experimental discovery of tantalum polyhydride superconductor. It was synthesized at high pressure and high temperature conditions using diamond anvil cell combined with in-situ high pressure laser heating techniques. The superconductivity was investigated via resistance measurements at pressures. The highest superconducting transition temperature T c was found to be ~30 K at 197 GPa in the sample that was synthesized at the same pressure with ~2000 K heating. The transitions are shifted to low temperature upon applying magnetic fields that supports the superconductivity nature. The upper critical field at zero temperature μ 0 H c2 (0) of the superconducting phase is estimated to be ~20 T that corresponds to GL coherent length ~40 Å. Our results suggest that the superconductivity may arise from I-43d phase of TaH3. It is for the first time experimental realization of superconducting hydrides for the VB group of transitional metals.