Enhancement of photoconversion efficiency in dye-sensitized solar cells exploiting pulsed laser deposited niobium pentoxide blocking layers
Abstract Among all the photovoltaic technologies developed so far, dye-sensitized solar cells are considered as a promising alternative to the expensive and environmentally unfriendly crystalline silicon-based solar cells. One of the possible strategies employed to increase their photovoltaic efficiency is to reduce the charge recombination at the cell conductive substrate through the use of a compact blocking layer. In this paper, we report on the fabrication and characterization of dye-sensitized solar cells employing niobium pentoxide (Nb 2 O 5 ) thin film blocking layer deposited through the pulsed laser deposition technique on conductive substrates. The careful selection of the optimal…
Search forBs0→μ+μ−andB0→μ+μ−Decays with CDF II
A search has been performed for B{sub s}{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} and B{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -} decays using 7 fb{sup -1} of integrated luminosity collected by the CDF II detector at the Fermilab Tevatron collider. The observed number of B{sup 0} candidates is consistent with background-only expectations and yields an upper limit on the branching fraction of {Beta}(B{sup 0} {yields} {mu}{sup +}{mu}{sup -}) < 6.0 x 10{sup -9} at 95% confidence level. We observe an excess of B{sub s}{sup 0} candidates. The probability that the background processes alone could produce such an excess or larger is 0.27%. The probability that the combination of background and the expe…
Measurement of thett¯production cross section inpp¯collisions ats=1.96 TeVusing soft electronb-tagging
The authors present a measurement of the t{bar t} production cross section using events with one charged lepton and jets from p{bar p} collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 1.96 TeV. A b-tagging algorithm based on the probability of displaced tracks coming from the event interaction vertex is applied to identify b quarks from top decay. Using 318 pb{sup -1} of data collected with the CDF II detector, they measure the t{bar t} production cross section in events with at least one restrictive (tight) b-tagged jet and obtain 8.9{sub -1.0}{sup +1.0}(stat.){sub -1.0}{sup +1.1}(syst.) pb. The cross section value assumes a top quark mass of m{sub t} is presented in the paper. This result is cons…
Observation of the rare B(s)(0) + decay from the combined analysis of CMS and LHCb data.
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NURE: An ERC project to study nuclear reactions for neutrinoless double beta decay
Neutrinoless double beta decay (0{\nu}\b{eta}\b{eta}) is considered the best potential resource to determine the absolute neutrino mass scale. Moreover, if observed, it will signal that the total lepton number is not conserved and neutrinos are their own anti-particles. Presently, this physics case is one of the most important research beyond Standard Model and might guide the way towards a Grand Unified Theory of fundamental interactions. Since the \b{eta}\b{eta} decay process involves nuclei, its analysis necessarily implies nuclear structure issues. The 0{\nu}\b{eta}\b{eta} decay rate can be expressed as a product of independent factors: the phase-space factors, the nuclear matrix elemen…