In this letter, the authors reported a high-k neodymium oxide gate dielectric grown by reactive rf sputtering. It is found that the Nd2O3 gate dielectric after annealing at 700°C exhibits excellent electrical properties such as low equivalent oxide thickness, high electric breakdown field, and almost no hysteresis and frequency dispersion in C-V curves. This indicates that annealing at 700°C treatment can prevent the interfacial layer and silicate formation, reduce a large amount of interface trap, and passivate a large amount of trapped charge at defect sites.

This paper reports strategies of sensitivity enhancement for magneto-optic surface plasmon resonance (MOSPR) sensors using metal heterostructure for two types of measured signals, ordinary and normalized reflectivity changes ( R PP and R PP /R PP ). The sensitivities using the R PP and R PP /R PP signals are effectively enhanced with the improvement as large as 58.91% and several orders by adjusting the device parameters. This paper demonstrates the occurrence of the maximal sensitivities for the R PP and R PP /R PP signals at different incident angles and composite film parameters for the first time. The sensing using the R PP /R PP signal requires a smaller total film thickness, a larger thickness ratio of the Co/Au film and a smaller thickness ratio of the underlay/overlay Au film than that using the R PP signal. Besides, the sensing using the R PP /R PP signal has a much higher sensitivity than that using the R PP signal. The conditions for maximal sensitivity and the physics of sensitivity enhancement for MOSPR sensors are also discussed. The newly-discovered ultra-high sensitivity using the R PP /R PP signal, which is several orders larger than that in the literature, has strict parameter tolerance and its realization requires accurate tuning of the device parameters.

By organizing the genome into gene modules (GMs), a living cell coordinates the activities of a set of genes to properly respond to environmental changes. The transcriptional regulation of the expression of a GM is usually carried out by a cooperative transcription factor set (CoopTFS) consisting of several cooperative transcription factors (TFs). Therefore, a database which provides CoopTFSs and their target GMs is useful for studying the cellular responses to internal or external stimuli. To address this need, here we constructed YGMD (Yeast Gene Module Database) to provide 34120 CoopTFSs, each of which consists of two to five cooperative TFs, and their target GMs. The cooperativity between TFs in a CoopTFS is suggested by physical/genetic interaction evidence or/and predicted by existing algorithms. The target GM regulated by a CoopTFS is defined as the common target genes of all the TFs in that CoopTFS. The regulatory association between any TF in a CoopTFS and any gene in the target GM is supported by experimental evidence in the literature. In YGMD, users can (i) search the GM regulated by a specific CoopTFS of interest or (ii) search all possible CoopTFSs whose target GMs contain a specific gene of interest. The biological relevance of YGMD is shown by a case study which demonstrates that YGMD can provide a GM enriched with genes known to be regulated by the query CoopTFS (Cbf1-Met4-Met32). We believe that YGMD provides a valuable resource for yeast biologists to study the transcriptional regulation of GMs. Database URL: http://cosbi4.ee.ncku.edu.tw/YGMD/, http://cosbi5.ee.ncku.edu.tw/YGMD/ or http://cosbi.ee.ncku.edu.tw/YGMD/