The Technical Design for the COMET Phase-I experiment is presented in this paper. COMET is an experiment at J-PARC, Japan, which will search for neutrinoless conversion of muons into electrons in the field of an aluminum nucleus ($\mu$–$e$ conversion, $\mu^{-}N \rightarrow e^{-}N$); a lepton flavor-violating process. The experimental sensitivity goal for this process in the Phase-I experiment is $3.1\times10^{-15}$, or 90% upper limit of a branching ratio of $7\times 10^{-15}$, which is a factor of 100 improvement over the existing limit. The expected number of background events is 0.032. To achieve the target sensitivity and background level, the 3.2 kW 8 GeV proton beam from J-PARC will be used. Two types of detectors, CyDet and StrECAL, will be used for detecting the $\mu$–$e$ conversion events, and for measuring the beam-related background events in view of the Phase-II experiment, respectively. Results from simulation on signal and background estimations are also described.

Electrodes that suppress protein adsorption are particularly important for the development of electrochemical biosensors and electroanalysis of biological samples. We studied the electrochemical performances of carbon film electrodes before and after water vapor (H 2 O) and ammonia gas (NH 3) plasma treatments. The H 2 O plasma treatment substantially increased the surface oxygen concentration and decreased the contact angle. The NH 3 plasma treatment increased the surface nitrogen content to about 5 at %, but a similar amount of oxygen remained on the surface. The sp 2 bond amounts decreased and the sp 3 bond amounts increased after the H 2 O plasma treatment, whereas both amounts changed little after the NH 3 plasma treatment. Cyclic voltammetry with the plasma-treated electrodes showed an increase in the peak separation (ΔE) of less than 20 mV for 1 mM Fe(CN) 6 3-/4-containing 100 mg/mL bovine serum albumin (BSA), whereas ΔE of the untreated carbon film increased by about 600 mV. Thus, both plasma-treated electrodes strongly suppressed the protein adsorption. The NH 3 plasma-treated film showed the highest electrochemical activity and lowest redox peak separation with and without BSA despite its higher contact angle value than of the H 2 O plasma-treated film. For both plasma-treated films, ΔE did not depend on BSA concentration.

Microstructures on a dummy substrate are bonded and transferred to the main substrate in a transfer process. The novel transfer process is developed using a new release layer on the dummy substrate. The release layer consists of a TiO 2 layer and a poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) film. Although the dummy substrate sticks to the main substrate after the bonding, the dummy substrate can be separated from the main substrate without using a pulling force by the UV exposure of the release layer. The force-free release can be obtained by PMMA film degradation by UV exposure. A cantilever with long beams (up to 1000 mm) and a wide base (5 Â 3 mm 2 ) is successfully fabricated by the new transfer process.

The supporting effect of a N-doped carbon film induced superior crystallinity in electrodeposited Ni@Ni(OH)2 core–shell nanoparticles.