their strong potential as replacements for ITO these materials suffer from the classic trade-off between optical transmittance and electrical conductivity. Thicker layers afford higher conductivity, but this increase comes at the expense of optical transmittance and vice versa. In addition, large-area organic devices built using fl exible transparent conducting electrodes based on these materials exhibit low efficiency, owing to the low conductivity of TCEs, in the absence of additional metal grids. [17][18][19][20][21][22] It is possible to improve the conductivity of TCEs by incorporating metal grids in the organic devices. These metal grids are either deposited by thermal evaporation using a shadow mask, [ 17,18 ] patterned by lithographic methods, [ 19,20 ] or printed. [ 21,22 ] In organic devices, however, there is a limit to how thick the metal grids deposited beneath the organic layer can be. Because the organic layer is extremely thin (typically a few hundred nanometers in thickness), there is the possibility of there being electrical short-circuiting between the metal grids and the top electrode. To prevent this, researchers have tried inserting an insulating layer between the metal grids and the organic layers. [ 19 ] However, this process increases the manufacturing cost. Electrical short circuiting due to the use of printed metal grids can be prevented by embedding the grids in a polymer substrate. [ 24,25 ] Recently, a damascene process was used to fabricate a metalembedding fl exible substrate (MEFS). The process involved the fabrication of trench-like structures on fl exible substrates using imprint lithography. Metal was deposited in the trench-like patterns and this was followed by the removal of any superfl uous metal fi lm by chemical-mechanical polishing. [ 23 ] However, this process is expensive.Here we report a universal method to overcome this trade-off by using a combination of metal-embedding architecture into plastic substrate and ultrathin transparent electrodes, leading to highly transparent (optical transmittance ≈93% at a wavelength of 550 nm), highly conducting (sheet resistance ≈13 Ω ٗ −1 ) and extremely fl exible (bending radius ≈200 μ m) electrodes with very smooth surface. These electrodes were used to fabricate fl exible organic devices that exhibited performances similar or superior to that of devices fabricated on glass substrate. In addition, these fabricated fl exible devices did not show degradation in their performance even after being folded with a radius of ≈200 μ m.Extremely fl exible transparent conducting electrodes are developed using a combination of metal-embedding architecture into plastic substrate and ultrathin transparent electrodes, which leads to highly transparent (optical transmittance ≈93% at a wavelength of 550 nm), highly conducting (sheet resistance ≈13 Ω ᮀ −1 ), and extremely fl exible (bending radius ≈ 200 μ m) electrodes. The electrodes are used to fabricate fl exible organic solar cells and organic light-emitting diodes that exhibit performance sim...

The thermal conductivity of AlN and SiC thin films sputtered on silicon substrates is measured employing the 3ω method. The thickness of the AlN sample is varied in the range from 200 to 2000 nm to analyze the size effect. The SiC thin films are prepared at two different temperatures, 20 and 500 • C, and the effect of deposition temperature on thermal conductivity is examined. The results reveal that the thermal conductivity of the thin films is significantly smaller than that of the same material in bulk form. The thermal conductivity of the AlN thin film is strongly dependent on the film thickness. For the case of SiC thin films, however, increased deposition temperature results in negligible change in the thermal conductivity as the temperature is below the critical temperature for crystallization. To explain the thermal conduction in the thin films, the thermal conductivity and microstructure are compared using x-ray diffraction patterns.

Astrophysical neutrinos travel long distances from their sources to the Earth traversing dark matter halos of clusters of galaxies and that of our own Milky Way. The interaction of neutrinos with dark matter may affect the flux of neutrinos. The recent multimessenger observation of a high energy neutrino, IceCube-170922A, can give a robust upper bound σ/M dm 5.1 × 10 −23 cm 2 / GeV on the interaction between neutrino and dark matter at a neutrino energy of 290 TeV allowing 90% suppression. Combining the constraints from CMB and LSS at different neutrino energies, we can constrain models of dark matter-neutrino interactions. PACS numbers:Introduction. Since neutrinos interact only weakly with matter they can propagate cosmological distances without attenuation and are considered to be ideal messenger particles to uncover the mysteries of distant astrophysical objects. The recent discovery of a very high energy neutrino, IceCube-170922A, was followed by multimessenger observations including gamma-ray, X-ray, optical, and radio. Through these accompanying observations, the source of this 290 TeV neutrino could be identified as a flaring blazar located at a distance of 1421 Mpc [1].New interactions of neutrinos with matter in the Universe may affect the propagation of neutrinos by reducing the flux or changing neutrino flavors [2,3]. The nondiagonal or nonuniversal matter potential generated by new interactions modifies the neutrino oscillation behavior and could result in deviation from the present expectations. Strong constraints can be obtained on nonstandard interactions from atmospheric data [4], at the production, propagation and detection [5], and from neutrino experiments [6].Neutrinos could have interactions with dark matter and observations of distant sources are ideal to probe such processes. Dark matter composes 26% of the massenergy content of the present Universe and spreads all over the Universe, with more localization near galaxies and clusters of galaxies. Even though the simplest cosmological Λ CDM model assumes only gravitationally interacting dark matter, many models of particles physics predict nongravitational interactions of dark matter with standard model particles as well as self interaction between dark matter [7].The interaction of neutrinos with dark matter, denoted DM, has been considered in cosmology and neutrino observations. Before the last scattering of CMB, the interactions of DM beyond gravity leads to a suppression of

Among insect-fungus relationships, xylose-fermenting Scheffersomyces yeasts are well known for their potential in utilizing wood hemicelluloses and their association with various wood-feeding insects. However, their specificity to host insects or strain-level diversity within host species has not been clearly elucidated. In the insect family Lucanidae, larvae usually feed on decaying wood, and adult females consistently possess a fungus-storage organ, called the mycangium, near the abdominal tip. Here the authors investigated host-symbiont relationships between Scheffersomyces yeast symbionts and small blue stag beetles of the genus Platycerus (Coleoptera: Lucanidae) in East Asia by using intergenic spacer (IGS) region as a genetic marker. All yeast strains isolated from the female mycangium of three Platycerus species, P. hongwonpyoi from Korea and P. acuticollis and P. delicatulus from Japan, were allied to Scheffersomyces segobiensis based on the sequences of the nrDNA 26S and internal transcribed spacer (ITS), in which no sequence difference was observed among those strains. However, IGS regions showed clear genetic differentiation within the yeast symbionts of P. hongwonpyoi, as well as between those of Korean and Japanese Platycerus species. In the IGS sequences, nucleotide substitutions were mainly distributed in the whole stretch of IGS1 and the anterior half of IGS2, whereas nucleotide gaps were localized at IGS1 and the middle of IGS2. Despite the conserved association between the Platycerus beetles and the specific strains of S. segobiensis in East Asia, geophylogenetic divergence patterns of the yeast symbionts were not concordant with those of the insect hosts.

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