Dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) have attracted significant attention as low-cost alternatives to conventional solid-state photovoltaic devices. [1][2][3] In these cells, the most successful chargetransfer sensitizers employed are ruthenium polypyridyl complexes, yielding 9-11% solar-to-electric power conversion efficiencies under AM 1.5. 4 The majority of the ruthenium complexes reported to date show absorption in the visible region at around 535 nm. Essential for efficient conversion of solar energy by DSSC is the spectral match of the sensitizer absorption to the solar radiation, and in this regard, the ruthenium complexes are inadequate. Therefore, development of sensitizers with extended absorption and spectral sensitivity into the infrared region is essential. Squaraines are well-known for their intense absorption in the red/near-IR regions, and for that reason, they are an excellent option to explore for solar cell applications. 5 Various groups have tested squaraines as sensitizers on wide band gap oxide semiconductors and obtained rather low power conversion efficiencies. [6][7][8][9][10] The reported low efficiencies of squaraines are due to aggregation and lack of directionality in the excited state. 11 There are several basic requirements guiding the molecular engineering of an efficient sensitizer. The excited-state redox potential should match the energy of the conduction band edge of the oxide. Light excitation should be associated with vectorial electron flow from the light-harvesting moiety of the sensitizer toward the semiconductor surface, providing for efficient electron transfer from the excited dye to the TiO 2 conduction band. Finally, a strong conjugation across the chromophore and anchoring groups is required for a good electronic coupling between the lowest unoccupied orbital (LUMO) of the dye and the TiO 2 conduction band. In order to satisfy these essential requirements, we have designed and developed a novel asymmetrical squaraine sensitizer that has a carboxylic acid group directly attached to the chromophore. In this paper, we report on the synthesis, electronic, and photovoltaic properties of the squaraine sensitizer. Scheme 1 shows the synthetic strategy used to obtain squaraine sensitizer (see Supporting Information for synthetic details). The UV/vis absorption spectrum (see Figure S1 in Supporting Information) of the squaraine sensitizer in ethanol shows an absorption maximum at 636 nm with high molar extinction coefficient ( ) 158 500 dm 3 mol -1 cm -1 ) corresponding to π-π* charge-transfer (CT) transitions. When the squaraine sensitizer is excited within the CT absorption band at room temperature in an air-equilibrated ethanol solution, it exhibits a strong luminescence maximum at 659 nm. The absorption spectrum of the squaraine sensitizer adsorbed on a 4 µm TiO 2 film shows features similar to those seen in the corresponding solution spectrum but exhibits a slight red shift of 15 nm due to the interaction of the anchoring group with the surface (see Figure S2 in Supportin...

The upcoming Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will detect many strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae (LSNe Ia) for timedelay cosmography. This will provide an independent and direct way for measuring the Hubble constant H 0 , which is necessary to address the current 4.4σ tension in H 0 between the local distance ladder and the early Universe measurements. We present a detailed analysis of different observing strategies (also referred to as cadence strategy) for the LSST, and quantify their impact on time-delay measurement between multiple images of LSNe Ia. For this, we simulated observations by using mock LSNe Ia for which we produced mock-LSST light curves that account for microlensing. Furthermore, we used the free-knot splines estimator from the software PyCS to measure the time delay from the simulated observations. We find that using only LSST data for time-delay cosmography is not ideal. Instead, we advocate using LSST as a discovery machine for LSNe Ia, enabling time delay measurements from follow-up observations from other instruments in order to increase the number of systems by a factor of 2 to 16 depending on the observing strategy. Furthermore, we find that LSST observing strategies, which provide a good sampling frequency (the mean inter-night gap is around two days) and high cumulative season length (ten seasons with a season length of around 170 days per season), are favored. Rolling cadences subdivide the survey and focus on different parts in different years; these observing strategies trade the number of seasons for better sampling frequency. In our investigation, this leads to half the number of systems in comparison to the best observing strategy. Therefore rolling cadences are disfavored because the gain from the increased sampling frequency cannot compensate for the shortened cumulative season length. We anticipate that the sample of lensed SNe Ia from our preferred LSST cadence strategies with rapid follow-up observations would yield an independent percent-level constraint on H 0 .

Cubical type theory provides a constructive justification to certain aspects of homotopy type theory such as Voevodsky's univalence axiom. This makes many extensionality principles, like function and propositional extensionality, directly provable in the theory. This paper describes a constructive semantics, expressed in a presheaf topos with suitable structure inspired by cubical sets, of some higher inductive types. It also extends cubical type theory by a syntax for the higher inductive types of spheres, torus, suspensions, truncations, and pushouts. All of these types are justified by the semantics and have judgmental computation rules for all constructors, including the higher dimensional ones, and the universes are closed under these type formers.

To use strongly lensed Type Ia supernovae (LSNe Ia) for cosmology, a time-delay measurement between the multiple supernova (SN) images is necessary. The sharp rise and decline of SN Ia light curves make them promising for measuring time delays, but microlensing can distort these light curves and therefore add large uncertainties to the measurements. An alternative approach is to use color curves where uncertainties due to microlensing are significantly reduced for a certain period of time known as the achromatic phase. In this work, we investigate in detail the achromatic phase, testing four different SN Ia models with various microlensing configurations. We find on average an achromatic phase of around three rest-frame weeks or longer for most color curves, but the spread in the duration of the achromatic phase (due to different microlensing maps and filter combinations) is quite large and an achromatic phase of just a few days is also possible. Furthermore, the achromatic phase is longer for smoother microlensing maps and lower macro-magnifications. From our investigations, we do not find a strong dependency on the SN model or on asymmetries in the SN ejecta. We find that six rest-frame LSST color curves exhibit features such as extreme points or turning points within the achromatic phase, which make them promising for time-delay measurements; however, only three of the color curves are independent. These curves contain combinations of rest-frame bands u, g, r, and i, and to observe them for typical LSN Ia redshifts, it would be ideal to cover (observer-frame) filters r, i, z, y, J, and H. If follow-up resources are restricted, we recommend r, i, and z as the bare minimum for using color curves and/or light curves since LSNe Ia are bright in these filters and observational uncertainties are lower than in the infrared regime. With additional resources, infrared observations in y, J, and H would be useful for obtaining color curves of SNe, especially at redshifts above ∼0.8 when they become critical.

No abstract

The controlled fabrication of submicrometer phase-separated morphologies of semiconducting organic materials is attracting considerable interest, for example, in emerging thin-film optoelectronic device applications. For thin films of spin-coated blends of PCBM ([6,6]-phenyl-C 61 -butyric acid methyl ester) and cationic cyanine dyes, we used atomic force microscopy scans to infer the structure formation mechanism: The solutions separate into transient bilayers, which further spinodally destabilize because of long-range molecular interactions. A thin layer ruptures earlier than a thick layer, and the earlier instability determines the morphology. Consequently, the resulting morphology type mainly depends on the ratio of the layer thicknesses, whereas the periodicity of structures is determined by the absolute film thickness. These findings allow control of the feature sizes, and nodular domains with diameters well below 50 nm were produced. Films prepared with dyes possessing a mobile counterion were always unstable. To rationalize the findings, we developed a thermodynamic model showing that electrostatic forces induced by the mobile counterions act as destabilizing pressure.

Cosmology is one of the four science pillars of LSST, which promises to be transformative for our understanding of dark energy and dark matter. The LSST Dark Energy Science Collaboration (DESC) has been tasked with deriving constraints on cosmological parameters from LSST data. Each of the cosmological probes for LSST is heavily impacted by the choice of observing strategy. This white paper is written by the LSST DESC Observing Strategy Task Force (OSTF), which represents the entire collaboration, and aims to make recommendations on observing strategy that will benefit all cosmological analyses with LSST. It is accompanied by the DESC DDF (Deep Drilling Fields) white paper (Scolnic et al.). We use a variety of metrics to understand the effects of the observing strategy on measurements of weak lensing, large-scale structure, clusters, photometric redshifts, supernovae, strong lensing and kilonovae. In order to reduce systematic uncertainties, we conclude that the current baseline observing strategy needs to be significantly modified to result in the best possible cosmological constraints. We provide some key recommendations: moving the WFD (Wide-Fast-Deep) footprint to avoid regions of high extinction, taking visit pairs in different filters, changing the 2×15s snaps to a single exposure to improve efficiency, focusing on strategies that reduce long gaps (>15 days) between observations, and prioritizing spatial uniformity at several intervals during the 10-year survey.

We present the HOLISMOKES programme on strong gravitational lensing of supernovae (SNe) as a probe of SN physics and cosmology. We investigate the effects of microlensing on early-phase SN Ia spectra using four different SN explosion models. We find that distortions of SN Ia spectra due to microlensing are typically negligible within ten rest-frame days after a SN explosion (< 1% distortion within the 1σ spread and ≲10% distortion within the 2σ spread). This shows the great prospects of using lensed SNe Ia to obtain intrinsic early-phase SN spectra for deciphering SN Ia progenitors. As a demonstration of the usefulness of lensed SNe Ia for cosmology, we simulate a sample of mock lensed SN Ia systems that are expected to have accurate and precise time-delay measurements in the era of the Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). Adopting realistic yet conservative uncertainties on their time-delay distances and lens angular diameter distances, of 6.6% and 5%, respectively, we find that a sample of 20 lensed SNe Ia would allow us to constrain the Hubble constant (H0) with 1.3% uncertainty in the flat ΛCDM cosmology. We find a similar constraint on H0 in an open ΛCDM cosmology, while the constraint degrades to 3% in a flat wCDM cosmology. We anticipate lensed SNe to be an independent and powerful probe of SN physics and cosmology in the upcoming LSST era.