For an electrodeposited bismuth telluride $\left({\mathrm{Bi}}_x{\mathrm{Te}}_{1-x}\right)$ nanowire from one batch with $x$ found to be about 0.46, the Seebeck coefficient $\left(S\right)$ was measured to be 15%–60% larger than the bulk values at temperature $300\mathrm{K}$ . For four other nanowires from a different batch with $x\approx 0.54$ , $S$ was much smaller than the bulk values. The electrical conductivity of the nanowires showed unusually weak temperature dependence and the values at $300\mathrm{K}$ were close to the bulk values. Below $300\mathrm{K}$ , phonon-boundary scattering dominated phonon-phonon Umklapp scattering in the nanowires, reducing the lattice thermal conductivity.

We theoretically investigate beam properties in a laser system of two scatterers with cascaded Kerr medium disks. A non-hot-image-plane intense fringe may appear when an intense laser beam passes through cascaded Kerr medium disks, which is modulated by double scatterers. It is found that besides generating hot images at expected positions, a new intense fringe appears at a position of about tens of centimeters downstream of the hot-image plane. The intensity of this intense fringe is greater than that of the first hot image, and it is sufficient to damage the optical elements. The effects of object distance, wavelength, and width of scatterer on the properties of this intense fringe are investigated, and we find that this intense fringe appears under certain conditions. Its intensity is closely related to several factors, such as the distance from the scatterer to the first Kerr medium disk, the scatterer width, and the wavelength of the incident beam, as well as the position of this intense fringe, which is not varied with the object distance.

Graphyne, a new two-dimensional carbon allotrope containing both sp and sp² hybridized states, is a current topic of focus in nanomaterial research community. Taking gamma (γ)-graphyne as an example, we investigate the stain effect on its thermal transport properties by using the nonequilibrium Green’s function approach. The results show that the thermal conductance can be modulated continuously and reversibly by varying the strength and direction of applied stain. Though analysis the phonon dispersion, we found that the reduction of thermal conductance is mainly attributed to the depression of phonon branches and decreasing of group velocity. In addition, the discrepancy between our results and molecular dynamic simulations is also discussed. It reveals the importance of anharmonic effect on the thermal transport property of stained γ-graphyne. The findings could shed light on the possibility of using strain to tuning the thermal conductance of γ-graphyne and thus improve its thermoelectric performance.

Implementation of distribution automation (DA) and demand side management (DSM) intended to serve both utilities and a large number of customers which spread over a large geographical area, requires a wide-area two-way communication system. DA and DSM devices (customer meters, switches, etc.), embedded with powerline communication, can use the powerline as a communication medium, to construct a cost-effective and high speed transmission communication network. REMPLI project aims at designing and implementing a communication infrastructure for distributed data acquisition and remote control operation using the power grid as the communication medium. In this paper, we evaluate the REMPLI PLC network performance to show how the requirements for both DA/DSM applications can be met. And a scheduling policy is proposed to provide the applications with differentiate QoS in a multitasking environment