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Creators/Authors contains: "Ma, Tao"

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  1. Free, publicly-accessible full text available May 1, 2026
  2. Synthesis of bimetallic electrocatalysts for CO2 reduction using atomic layer deposition results in changes in chemical state and product selectivity. 
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  3. Abstract. A portion of Alaska's Fairbanks North Star Borough was designated as nonattainment for the 2006 24 h fine particulate matter 2.5 µm or less in diameter (PM2.5) National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) in 2009. PM2.5 NAAQS exceedances in Fairbanks mainly occur during dark and cold winters, when temperature inversions form and trap high emissions at the surface. Sulfate (SO42-), often the second-largest contributor to PM2.5 mass during these wintertime PM episodes, is underpredicted by atmospheric chemical transport models (CTMs). Most CTMs account for primary SO42- and secondary SO42- formed via gas-phase oxidation of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and in-cloud aqueous oxidation of dissolved S(IV). Dissolution and reaction of SO2 in aqueous aerosols are generally not included in CTMs but can be represented as heterogeneous reactive uptake and may help better represent the high SO42- concentrations observed during Fairbanks winters. In addition, hydroxymethanesulfonate (HMS), a particulate sulfur species sometimes misidentified as SO42-, is known to form during Fairbanks winters. Heterogeneous formation of SO42- and HMS in aerosol liquid water (ALW) was implemented in the Community Multiscale Air Quality (CMAQ) modeling system. CMAQ simulations were performed for wintertime PM episodes in Fairbanks (2008) as well as over the Northern Hemisphere and Contiguous United States (CONUS) for 2015–2016. The added heterogeneous sulfur chemistry reduced model mean sulfate bias by ∼ 0.6 µg m−3 during a cold winter PM episode in Fairbanks, AK. Improvements in model performance are also seen in Beijing during wintertime haze events (reducing model mean sulfate bias by ∼ 2.9 µg S m−3). This additional sulfur chemistry also improves modeled summertime SO42- bias in the southeastern US, with implications for future modeling of biogenic organosulfates. 
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  4. Abstract Metal‐halide perovskites are known for their strong and tunable luminescence. However, the synthesis of perovskite‐based particles with circularly polarized light emission (CPLE) remains challenging due to the complex interplay of metal‐ligand chemistries, crystallization patterns, and chirality transfer mechanisms. Achiral perovskites can be deposited on chiral “hedgehog” particles (CHIPs) with twisted spikes, producing chiroptically active materials with spectroscopic bands specific to the perovskite and chirality specific to the template CHIPs. Left‐ and right‐handed CPLE is engineered into complex particles comprised of a layer of perovskite deposited onto CHIPs coated with an intermediate silica layer. The spectral position of chiroptical bands, the optical asymmetryg‐factors, and single‐particle circularly polarized microscopy indicate that the observed CPLE is dominated by the post‐emission scattering from the twisted spikes of the parent particle. Templating luminescent nanofilms on CHIPs provides a simple pathway to a wide range of complex chiroptical materials; the dispersibility of the CHIPs in various solvents and the tunability of their chiral geometry enable their applications as single‐particle emitters with strong and controllable polarization rotation. 
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  5. In cloud-native environments, containers are often deployed within lightweight virtual machines (VMs) to ensure strong security isolation and privacy protection. With the growing demand for customized cloud services, third-party vendors are turning to infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud providers to build their own cloud-native platforms, necessitating the need to run a VM or a guest that hosts containers inside another VM instance leased from an IaaS cloud. State-of-the-art nested virtualization in the x86 architecture relies heavily on the host hypervisor to expose hardware virtualization support to the guest hypervisor, not only complicating cloud management but also raising concerns about an increased attack surface at the host hypervisor. This paper presents the design and implementation of PVM, a high-performance guest hypervisor for KVM that is transparent to the host hypervisor and assumes no hardware virtualization support. PVM leverages two key designs: 1) a minimal shared memory region between the guest and guest hypervisor to facilitate state transition between different privilege levels and 2) an efficient shadow page table design to reduce the cost of memory virtualization. PVM has been adopted by a major IaaS cloud provider for hosting tens of thousands of secure containers on a daily basis. Our experiments demonstrate that PVM significantly outperforms current nested virtualization in KVM for memory virtualization, particularly for concurrent workloads, while maintaining comparable performance in CPU and I/O virtualization. 
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  6. To date, it has remained challenging to achieve N-polar AlN, which is of great importance for high power, high frequency, and high temperature electronics, acoustic resonators and filters, ultraviolet (UV) optoelectronics, and integrated photonics. Here, we performed a detailed study of the molecular beam epitaxy and characterization of N-polar AlN on C-face 4H-SiC substrates. The N-polar AlN films grown under optimized conditions exhibit an atomically smooth surface and strong excitonic emission in the deep UV with luminescence efficiency exceeding 50% at room temperature. Detailed scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) studies suggest that most dislocations are terminated/annihilated within ∼200 nm AlN grown directly on the SiC substrate due to the relatively small (1%) lattice mismatch between AlN and SiC. The strain distribution of AlN is further analyzed by STEM and micro-Raman spectroscopy, and its impact on the temperature-dependent deep UV emission is elucidated. 
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