Experiments are described in which a direct comparison was made between a conventional 2 kW water‐cooled sealed‐tube X‐ray source and a 30 W air‐cooled microfocus source with focusing multilayer optics, using the same goniometer, detector, radiation (Mo Kα), crystals and software. The beam characteristics of the two sources were analyzed and the quality of the resulting data sets compared. The Incoatec Microfocus Source (IµS) gave a narrow approximately Gaussian‐shaped primary beam profile, whereas the Bruker AXS sealed‐tube source, equipped with a graphite monochromator and a monocapillary collimator, had a broader beam with an approximate intensity plateau. Both sources were mounted on the same Bruker D8 goniometer with a SMART APEX II CCD detector and Bruker Kryoflex low‐temperature device. Switching between sources simply required changing the software zero setting of the 2θ circle and could be performed in a few minutes, so it was possible to use the same crystal for both sources without changing its temperature or orientation. A representative cross section of compounds (organic, organometallic and salt) with and without heavy atoms was investigated. For each compound, two data sets, one from a small and one from a large crystal, were collected using each source. In another experiment, the data quality was compared for crystals of the same compound that had been chosen so that they had dimensions similar to the width of the beam. The data were processed and the structures refined using standard Bruker and SHELX software. The experiments show that the IµS gives superior data for small crystals whereas the diffracted intensities were comparable for the large crystals. Appropriate scaling is particularly important for the IµS data.

Two new approaches for synthesizing RSiCl, (R = PhC(NtBu)(2)) are reported by the reaction of RSiHCl(2) with bis-trimethyl silyl lithium amide and N-heterocyclic carbene respectively. In the former method silylene is produced in 90% yield. The silylene was treated with biphenyl alkyne to afford the disilacyclobutene system. This is a rare example of two five-coordinate silicon centers arranged adjacent to each other in a four-membered ring. Furthermore, we fluorinated the four-membered ring by trimethyltin fluoride to obtain the fluoro substituted disilacyclobutene.

Tidal disruption events (TDEs) offer a unique way to study dormant black holes. While the number of observed TDEs has grown thanks to the emergence of wide-field surveys in the past few decades, questions regarding the nature of the observed optical, UV, and X-ray emission remain. We present a uniformly selected sample of 30 spectroscopically classified TDEs from the Zwicky Transient Facility Phase I survey operations with follow-up Swift UV and X-ray observations. Through our investigation into correlations between light-curve properties, we recover a shallow positive correlation between the peak bolometric luminosity and decay timescales. We introduce a new spectroscopic class of TDE, TDE-featureless, which are characterized by featureless optical spectra. The new TDE-featureless class shows larger peak bolometric luminosities, peak blackbody temperatures, and peak blackbody radii. We examine the differences between the X-ray bright and X-ray faint populations of TDEs in this sample, finding that X-ray bright TDEs show higher peak blackbody luminosities than the X-ray faint subsample. This sample of optically selected TDEs is the largest sample of TDEs from a single survey yet, and the systematic discovery, classification, and follow-up of this sample allows for robust characterization of TDE properties, an important stepping stone looking forward toward the Rubin era.

The Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) is a NASA Small Explorer mission that will carry the first focusing hard X-ray (6 -80 keV) telescope to orbit. NuSTAR will offer a factor 50 -100 sensitivity improvement compared to previous collimated or coded mask imagers that have operated in this energy band. In addition, NuSTAR provides sub-arcminute imaging with good spectral resolution over a 12-arcminute field of view. After launch, NuSTAR will carry out a two-year primary science mission that focuses on four key programs: studying the evolution of massive black holes through surveys carried out in fields with excellent multiwavelength coverage, understanding the population of compact objects and the nature of the massive black hole in the center of the Milky Way, constraining the explosion dynamics and nucleosynthesis in supernovae, and probing the nature of particle acceleration in relativistic jets in active galactic nuclei. A number of additional observations will be included in the primary mission, and a guest observer program will be proposed for an extended mission to expand the range of scientific targets. The payload consists of two co-aligned depth-graded multilayer coated grazing incidence optics focused onto a solid state CdZnTe pixel detectors. To be launched in early 2012 on a Pegasus rocket into a low-inclination Earth orbit, NuSTAR largely avoids SAA passage, and will therefore have low and stable detector backgrounds. The telescope achieves a 10.14-meter focal length through on-orbit deployment of an extendable mast. An aspect and alignment metrology system enable reconstruction of the absolute aspect and variations in the telescope alignment resulting from mast flexure during ground data processing. Data will be publicly available at GSFC's High Energy Archive Research Center (HEASARC) following validation at the science operations center located at Caltech.

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