Mid-Infrared Lasing in Lead Sulfide Subwavelength Wires on Silicon.

Vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth of nanoscale or subwavelength scale semiconductor wires (nanowires) has been proven to be an important and effective approach to producing high-quality, substrate insensitive photonic materials with a flexible and ever-expanding coverage of wavelengths for lasing and other photonic applications. However, the materials and lasing demonstrations have so far been limited to mostly ultraviolet to visible wavelengths, with a few exceptions in the short-wavelength infrared range. A further extension to longer wavelengths (such as mid-infrared, MIR) using narrower band gap semiconductors encounters severe challenges: the ever decreasing radiative efficiency due to the Auger and other nonradiative channels with wavelengths demands extremely high material quality and significantly narrows the material choices.

Prophylactic Sacral Dressing for Pressure Ulcer Prevention in High-Risk Patients.

Background: Patients in intensive care units are likely to have limited mobility owing to hemodynamic instability and activity orders for bed rest. Bed rest is indicated because of the severity of the disease process, which often involves intubation, sedation, paralysis, surgical procedures, poor nutrition, low flow states, and poor circulation. These patients are predisposed to the development and/or the progression of pressure ulcers not only because of their underlying diseases, but also because of limited mobility and deconditioned states of health.

CdxPb(1-x)S alloy nanowires and heterostructures with simultaneous emission in mid-infrared and visible wavelengths.

Alloying of CdS and PbS could potentially provide an important semiconductor with a wide range of bandgaps, with bandedge emission from mid-infrared to visible green, for various optoelectronic applications. We investigate the possibility of CdPbS alloy formation in nanowire and nanobelt forms, especially the dependence of alloy composition on two different cooling routes. Our results show that rapid cooling immediately after the growth phase can lead to a high-quality uniform alloy with Cd composition larger than possible at thermal equilibrium and by natural cooling.

Oral and tympanic membrane temperatures are inaccurate to identify Fever in emergency department adults.

Introduction: Identifying fever can influence management of the emergency department (ED) patient, including diagnostic testing, treatment, and disposition. We set out to determine how well oral and tympanic membrane (TM) temperatures compared with rectal measurements.

Methods: A convenience sample of consecutively adult ED patients had oral, TM, and rectal temperatures performed within several minutes of each other.

Contact printing of compositionally graded CdS(x)Se(1-x) nanowire parallel arrays for tunable photodetectors.

Spatially composition-graded CdS(x)Se(1-x) (x = 0-1) nanowires are grown and transferred as parallel arrays onto Si/SiO(2) substrates by a one-step, directional contact printing process. Upon subsequent device fabrication, an array of tunable-wavelength photodetectors is demonstrated. From the spectral photoconductivity measurements, the cutoff wavelength for the device array, as determined by the bandgap, is shown to cover a significant portion of the visible spectrum.

Influence of supersaturation and spontaneous catalyst formation on the growth of PbS wires: toward a unified understanding of growth modes.

High quality stoichiometric lead sulfide (PbS) wires were synthesized by a simple chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process using pure PbS powder as the material source. Growth mechanisms were systematically investigated under various growth conditions, with three modes of growth identified: direct vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) wire growth nucleating from the substrate surface, bulk PbS crystallites by vapor-solid (VS) deposition, and subsequent VLS growth nucleating on top of the bulk deposition through spontaneously formed catalyst particles. Furthermore, we found that these growth modes can be organized in terms of different levels of supersaturation, with VS bulk deposition dominating at high supersaturation and VLS wire growth on the substrate dominating at low supersaturation.