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Photocatalytic nitrogen fixation represents a green alternative to the conventional Haber–Bosch process in the conversion of nitrogen to ammonia. In this study, a series of Bi5O7Br nanostructures were synthesized via a facile, low-temperature thermal treatment procedure, and their photocatalytic activity toward nitrogen fixation was evaluated and compared. Spectroscopic measurements showed that the tubular Bi5O7Br sample prepared at 40 °C (Bi5O7Br-40) exhibited the highest electron-transfer rate among the series, producing a large number of O2 .– radicals and oxygen vacancies under visible-light photoirradiation and reaching a rate of photocatalytic nitrogen fixation of 12.72 mM·g–1·h–1 after 30 min of photoirradiation. The reaction dynamics was also monitored by in situ infrared measurements with a synchrotron radiation light source, where the transient difference between signals in the dark and under photoirradiation was analyzed and the reaction pathway of nitrogen fixation was identified. This was further supported by results from density functional theory calculations. The reaction energy of nitrogen fixation was quantitatively estimated and compared by building oxygen-enriched and anoxic models, where the change in the oxygen vacancy concentration was found to play a critical role in determining the nitrogen fixation performance. Results from this study suggest that Bi5O7Br with rich oxygen vacancies can be used as a high-performance photocatalyst for nitrogen fixation.

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A systematic calculation for the transition form factors of heavy to light mesons (B, Bs, D, Ds→ π, K, η, ρ, K*, ω, ϕ) is carried out by using light-cone sum rules in the framework of heavy quark effective field theory. The heavy quark symmetry at the leading order of 1/mQexpansion enables us to reduce the independent wave functions and establish interesting relations among form factors. Some relations hold for the whole region of momentum transfer. The meson distribution amplitudes up to twist-4 including the contributions from higher conformal spin partial waves and light meson mass corrections are considered. The CKM matrix elements |Vub|, |Vcs| and |Vcd| are extracted from some relatively well-measured decay channels. A detailed prediction for the branching ratios of heavy to light meson decays is then presented. The resulting predictions for the semileptonic and radiative decay rates of heavy to light mesons (B, Bs, D, Ds→ π, K, η, ρ, K*, ω, ϕ) are found to be compatible with the current experimental data and can be tested by more precise experiments at B-factory, LHCb, BEPCII and CLEOc.

Newly designed asymmetric diketopyrrolopyrrole conjugated polymers with two different aromatic substituents possess a hole mobility of 12.5 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1) in field-effect transistors and a power conversion efficiency of 6.5% in polymer solar cells, when solution processed from a nonchlorinated toluene/diphenyl ether mixed solvent.

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We investigate the particle production from thermal gravitational annihilation in the very early universe, which is an important contribution for particles that might not be in thermal equilibrium or/and might only have gravitational interaction, such as dark matter (DM). For particles with spin 0, 1/2 and 1 we calculate the relevant cross sections through gravitational annihilation and give the analytic formulas with full mass-dependent terms. We find that DM with mass between TeV and 10 16 GeV could have the relic abundance that fits the observation, with small dependence on its spin. We also discuss the effects of gravitational annihilation from inflatons. Interestingly, contributions from inflatons could be dominant and have the same power dependence on Hubble parameter of inflation as that from vacuum fluctuation. Also, fermion production from inflaton, in comparison to boson, is suppressed by its mass due to helicity selection.

A series of fully bio-based polyesters were synthesized and they served as petroleum-based compound substitutions to copolymerize with a soybean oil derivative, leading to higher performance and higher percentages of bio-based constituents.