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Creators/Authors contains: "Saunders, John"

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  1. Anisotropic pair breaking close to surfaces favors the chiral A phase of the superfluid He 3 over the time-reversal invariant B phase. Confining the superfluid He 3 into a cavity of height D of the order of the Cooper pair size characterized by the coherence length ξ 0 —ranging between 16 nm (34 bar) and 77 nm (0 bar)—extends the surface effects over the whole sample volume, thus allowing stabilization of the A phase at pressures P and temperatures T where otherwise the B phase would be stable. In this Letter, the surfaces of such a confined sample are covered with a superfluid He 4 film to create specular quasiparticle scattering boundary conditions, preventing the suppression of the superfluid order parameter. We show that the chiral A phase is the stable superfluid phase under strong confinement over the full P T phase diagram down to a quasi-two-dimensional limit D / ξ 0 = 1 , where D = 80 nm . The planar phase, which is degenerate with the chiral A phase in the weak-coupling limit, is not observed. The gap inferred from measurements over the wide pressure range from 0.2 to 21.0 bar leads to an empirical ansatz for temperature-dependent strong-coupling effects. We discuss how these results pave the way for the realization of the fully gapped two-dimensional p x + i p y superfluid under more extreme confinement. Published by the American Physical Society2025 
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    Free, publicly-accessible full text available March 31, 2026
  2. Abstract Aryl fluorosulfates of varying complexities have been used in amination reactions in water using a new Pd oxidative addition complex (OAC‐1) developed specifically to match the needs of the fine chemicals industry, not only in terms of functional group tolerance, but also reflecting time considerations associated with these important C−N couplings. Also especially noteworthy is that they replace both PFAS‐related triflates and nonaflates, which are today out of favor due to recent government regulations. The new complex based on the BippyPhos ligand is used at low loadings and under aqueous micellar conditions. Moreover, it is easily prepared and stable to long term storage. DFT calculations on the OAC precatalyst compare well with the X‐ray structure of the crystals with π‐complexation to the aromatic system of the ligand and also confirm the NMR data showing a mixture of conformers in solution that differ from the X‐ray structure in rotation of the phenyl andt‐butyl ligand substituents. An extensive variety of coupling partners, including pharmaceutically relevant APIs, readily participate under mild and environmentally responsible reaction conditions. 
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  3. Abstract The symmetry-breaking first-order phase transition between superfluid phases$$^3$$ 3 He-A and$$^3$$ 3 He-B can be triggered extrinsically by ionising radiation or heterogeneous nucleation arising from the details of the sample cell construction. However, the role of potential homogeneous intrinsic nucleation mechanisms remains elusive. Discovering and resolving the intrinsic processes may have cosmological consequences, since an analogous first-order phase transition, and the production of gravitational waves, has been predicted for the very early stages of the expanding Universe in many extensions of the Standard Model of particle physics. Here we introduce a new approach for probing the phase transition in superfluid$$^3$$ 3 He. The setup consists of a novel stepped-height nanofluidic sample container with close to atomically smooth walls. The$$^3$$ 3 He is confined in five tiny nanofabricated volumes and assayed non-invasively by NMR. Tuning of the state of$$^3$$ 3 He by confinement is used to isolate each of these five volumes so that the phase transitions in them can occur independently and free from any obvious sources of heterogeneous nucleation. The small volumes also ensure that the transitions triggered by ionising radiation are strongly suppressed. Here we present the preliminary measurements using this setup, showing both strong supercooling of$$^3$$ 3 He-A and superheating of$$^3$$ 3 He-B, with stochastic processes dominating the phase transitions between the two. The objective is to study the nucleation as a function of temperature and pressure over the full phase diagram, to both better test the proposed extrinsic mechanisms and seek potential parallel intrinsic mechanisms. 
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  5. The low cost of resource ownership and flexibility have led users to increasingly port their applications to the clouds. To fully realize the cost benefits of cloud services, users usually need to reliably know the execution performance of their applications. However, due to the random performance fluctuations experienced by cloud applications, the black box nature of public clouds and the cloud usage costs, testing on clouds to acquire accurate performance results is extremely difficult. In this paper, we present a novel cloud performance testing methodology called PT4Cloud. By employing non-parametric statistical approaches of likelihood theory and the bootstrap method, PT4Cloud provides reliable stop conditions to obtain highly accurate performance distributions with confidence bands. These statistical approaches also allow users to specify intuitive accuracy goals and easily trade between accuracy and testing cost. We evaluated PT4Cloud with 33 benchmark configurations on Amazon Web Service and Chameleon clouds. When compared with performance data obtained from extensive performance tests, PT4Cloud provides testing results with 95.4% accuracy on average while reducing the number of test runs by 62%. We also propose two test execution reduction techniques for PT4Cloud, which can reduce the number of test runs by 90.1% while retaining an average accuracy of 91%. We compared our technique to three other techniques and found that our results are much more accurate. 
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