A facile method for fabricating 3D-shaped liquid crystal elastomers at the macro- and microscales was developed by mechanical programming coupled with two-step photocrosslinking.

No abstract

Most studies of the Rashba effect have focused on interfacial Rashba spin–orbit coupling. Recently, bulk Rashba materials have attracted considerable interest owing to their potential to enhance the Rashba spin–orbit torque. By employing a bulk Rashba material, GeTe, as a spin–orbit channel in GeTe/NiFe bilayers, a large field-like spin–orbit torque up to 15.8 mT/(107 A cm−2) is measured. This value is one of the largest reported field-like torques and is attributed to the interfacial spin–orbit coupling being enhanced by the bulk Rashba effect in the GeTe channel. Furthermore, the large field-like torque is maintained even for a 20-nm-thick NiFe layer. This unconventional dependence on the thickness of both the GeTe and NiFe layers cannot be described by conventional theory, but it is believed to stem from the additional bulk Rashba effect-induced term. The large field-like torque over a wide range of ferromagnet thicknesses results in scalable in-plane spin–orbit torque devices. This result calls for a further theoretical study on spin transport in heterostructures, including bulk Rashba materials.

The electrodes of a polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) primarily contain a Pt/C catalyst and Nafion binder. Since these components play crucial roles in the redox reaction and proton transport, respectively, their distributions can directly affect the electrochemical reactivity and thus the device performance. Although analyzing the component distribution is important to understand its electrochemical reactivity and improve the device performance, determining it for the PEMFC electrode remains a challenging task. Herein, we propose a strategy for visualizing the spatial distribution of the electrode components and their heterogeneous electrical properties using multidimensional current–voltage (I–V) spectroscopy combined with data mining. The electrical properties of the electrode components, i.e., the Pt/C catalyst and Nafion binder, were explored by I–V spectroscopy, and their electrical heterogeneity was spatially classified based on the shapes of the measured I–V curves by cluster analysis. The results show that the components and their interfacial structure can be spatially visualized from the surface electrical heterogeneity. The proposed method is expected to be applicable for investigating in detail not only the spatial properties of PEMFC electrodes but also the properties of various material systems.

We propose Improved Self-Organized Graph(Improved SOG: SOG " ) thinning method, which maintains excellent thinning results of Self-Organized Graph(SOG) built from Self-Organizing features Map and improves the pl'rformance of the existing SOG by using II new incremental learning method of Kohonen features map. In the experiments, this method shows thl' thinning results to be equal (0 those of SOG but the time compleKity O«(logM») to be superior to that of SOG. Th .. refore, the proposed method is useful for tbe feature extraction from digils and characters in the preprocessing step.