EPJ N Highlight - Calculation of ion irradiation damage using Iradina code

Details

Published on 23 May 2019

Binary Collision Approximation (BCA) calculation allows for two types of damage calculation: Full Cascade and Quick Calculations. Full Cascade mode describes fully the cascades while in Quick Calculations only the trajectory of the ion is followed, and effective formulas give an estimation of the damage resulting from each collision of the ion. Quick Calculation of damage are implemented in the Iradina code both for elemental and multi-component solids. Good agreement is obtained with SRIM. It is shown that Quick Calculations are unphysical in multi-component systems. The choice between Full Cascade and Quick Calculations is discussed. It is advised in this paper to favour Full Cascade over Quick Calculation because it more grounded physically and applicable to all materials. Quick Calculations remain a good option for comparisons with former studies or for pure solids in the case of actual quantitative comparisons with neutron irradiations simulations in which damage levels are estimated with the NRT (Norgett-Robinson and Torrens) formulas.

Read more...

EPJ Data Science Highlight - What can we learn from billions of food purchases derived from fidelity cards?

Details

Published on 23 May 2019

For your health, what you eat is more important than what you earn.

This result comes from our latest project “Poor but Healthy”, which was published in EPJ Data Science, and comes with a @tobi_vierzwo’s stunningly “beautiful map of London” that author Daniele Quercia invites everyone to explore.

By combining 1.6B food item purchases with 1.1B medical prescriptions for the entire city of London for one year, researchers discovered that, to predict health outcomes, socio-economic conditions matter less than what previous research has shown: despite being of lower-income, certain areas are healthy, and that is because of what their residents eat.

Read the full blog post on Medium.

EPJD Topical review - Plasma potential probes for hot plasmas

Details

Published on 22 May 2019

Plasma probes are well-established diagnostic tools, being relatively simple to construct and easy to handle. The most easily accessible parameter is the floating potential, but the floating potential of a cold probe is not very significant; much more important and relevant is the plasma potential. However, in most types of plasmas, consisting mainly of electrons and only positive ions, the higher mobility of the electrons means that the floating potential is more negative than the plasma potential by a factor proportional to the electron temperature.

In a new Topical Review in EPJD co-authored by teams from Austria, Slovenia, Denmark and Italy, the authors present a review of probes whose floating potential is close or ideally equal to the plasma potential. Such probes are known as Plasma Potential Probes (PPP), and they can either be Electron Emissive Probes (EEPs) or so-called Electron Screening Probes (ESPs). These probes make it possible to measure the plasma potential directly and thus with high temporal resolution.

Read more...