Using an atomic force microscope we performed measurements of the Casimir force between a gold-coated (Au) microsphere and doped silicon carbide (SiC) samples. The last of these is a promising material for devices operating under severe environments. The roughness of the interacting surfaces was measured to obtain information for the minimum separation distance upon contact. Ellipsometry data for both systems were used to extract optical properties needed for the calculation of the Casimir force via the Lifshitz theory and for comparison to the experiment. Special attention is devoted to the separation of the electrostatic contribution to the measured total force. Our measurements demonstrate large contact potential V 0 (≈0.67 V), and a relatively small density of charges trapped in SiC. Knowledge of both Casimir and electrostatic forces between interacting materials is not only important from the fundamental point of view, but also for device applications involving actuating components at separations of less than 200 nm where surface forces play dominant role.

Reversible logic has applications in various research areas including signal processing, cryptography and quantum computation. In this paper, direct NCT-based synthesis of a given k-cycle in a cycle-based synthesis scenario is examined. To this end, a set of seven building blocks is proposed that reveals the potential of direct synthesis of a given permutation to reduce both quantum cost and average runtime. To synthesize a given large cycle, we propose a decomposition algorithm to extract the suggested building blocks from the input specification. Then, a synthesis method is introduced which uses the building blocks and the decomposition algorithm. Finally, a hybrid synthesis framework is suggested which uses the proposed cycle-based synthesis method in conjunction with one of the recent NCT-based synthesis approaches which is based on ReedMuller (RM) spectra. The time complexity and the effectiveness of the proposed synthesis approach are analyzed in detail. Our analyses show that the proposed hybrid framework leads to a better quantum cost in the worst-case scenario compared to the previously presented methods. The proposed framework always converges and typically synthesizes a given specification very fast compared to the available synthesis algorithms. Besides, the quantum costs of benchmark functions are improved about 20% on average (55% in the best case).

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