[1] On 11 March 2011, the devastating M9.0 Tohoku Earthquake occurred on the interface of the subducting Pacific plate, and was followed by a huge tsunami that killed about 20,000 people. Several geophysical studies have already suggested that the very shallow portion of the plate interface might have played an important role in producing such a large earthquake and tsunami. However, the sparsity of seafloor observations leads to insufficient spatial resolution of the fault slip on such a shallow plate interface. For this reason, the location and degree of the slip has not yet been estimated accurately enough to assess future seismic risks. Thus, we estimated the coseismic slip distribution based on terrestrial GPS observations and all available seafloor geodetic data that significantly improve the spatial resolution at the shallow portion of the plate interface. The results reveal that an extremely large (greater than 50 m) slip occurred in a small (about 40 km in width and 120 km in length) area near the Japan Trench and generated the huge tsunami. The estimated slip distribution and a comparison of it with the coupling coefficient distribution deduced from the analysis of the small repeating earthquakes suggest that the 2011 Tohoku Earthquake released strain energy that had accumulated over the past 1000 years, probably since the Jogan Earthquake in 869. The accurate assessments of seismic risks on very shallow plate interfaces in subduction zones throughout the world can be obtained by improving the quality and quantity of seafloor geodetic observations.

Hydrogen atoms adsorbed on TiO2(110)-(1x1) surfaces have been characterized by scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) combined with electron stimulated desorption (ESD) technique. Certain amounts of H atoms are unexpectedly found on the TiO2 surfaces annealed at 900 K. Two forms of adsorption were discriminated in STM images from the different sensitivity to ESD and tentatively assigned to hydroxyl-type (O-H) and hydride-type (Ti-H) species.

Stable gable radical: 1,3‐Diazaphenalenyl radical, a typical example of an isoelectronic mode of modification for phenalenyl, has been isolated for the first time as a crystalline solid by introducing bulky substituents (see picture, tert‐butyl groups are omitted from the crystal structure). The gable syn dimer with a column motif shows an extremely strong antiferromagnetic exchange coupling of 2J/kB=−4.19(2)×103 K.

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Bimetallic alloy nanoparticles (NPs) are attractive materials for exploring advanced functions to reduce consumption of resources and energy. AuPt alloy NPs are of special interest for their potential applications to fuel cells, because of the reduction of CO poisoning on Pt. Here, we report the synthesis of AuPt alloy NPs by sputter deposition into (N,N,N-trimethyl-N-propylammonium bis(trifluoromethanesulfonyl) amide (TMPA-TFSA). Transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray fluorescent spectroscopy (XRF) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) measurements showed that changes in particle diameters and compositions of AuPt bimetallic NPs, were controllable by choosing initial compositions of metal targets for the sputter deposition. By cyclic voltammetry measurements, the detection of an anodic peak corresponding to the methanol oxidation reaction on the AuPt NPs demonstrated the presence of an AuPt alloy phase in the NPs.

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