Tesi di Dottorato

Permanent URI for this communityTesi di Dottorato

Browse

End date: 2014Subject: search.filters.subject.Fisica

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 25
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Adsorption properties of carbon nanotubes and application of thermal desoprtion spectroscopy to ammonia and methane ices and zoisite
    (2010-12-14) Vasta, Roberta; Bonanno, Assunta; Falcone, Giovanni
    In this work we wanted to underline the importance of Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy and its applications to several branches of Physics. Temperature-programmed desorption techniques (TPD) are important to determinate kinetic and thermodynamic parameters of desorption processes and decomposition reactions. Knowledge of the nature of the desorption process is fundamental to understand the nature of the elementary chemical processes of adsorbates, as the energetics of bonding, the specification of the chemical nature of the bound species and the nature and magnitude of interactional effect between adsorbed species. We focused our attention on the applications of Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy (TDS) to High-Energies Physics, Astrophysics and Geophysics; in fact this technique was used, respectively, to investigate the molecular hydrogen adsorption on carbon nanotubes, the effects of electron bombardment on ammonia and methane ices and changes of zoisite mineral after heating. The molecular hydrogen adsorption on carbon nanotubes was studied to find a possible solution to vacuum system problems of Large Hadron Collider (LHC); in fact, the circular path of photon beams produces synchrotron radiation which deteriorates LHC vacuum desorbing gas molecules from the ring walls. Among the desorbed species the most problematic to pump out is H2. Since LHC elements operate at low temperatures, a possible solution to vacuum problem is the installation of cryosorbent materials on the LHC walls. In this work we study the possibility to use carbon nanotubes as criosorbers in future accelerators. Our sample, furnished by Prof. Nagy group of Chemical Engineering Department of Calabria University, is constituted by MWNTs synthesized by chemical vapor deposition using C2H4 and subsequently purified. Our investigations confirm that the carbon nanotubes have a great adsorption capacity also at low temperatures both for H2 and noble gases as Kr; then we observed that H2 adsorption on CNT is described by a first kinetic-order, while Kr adsorption is characterized by a zero kinetic-order. By means of TDS we calculate the activation energy for H2 adsorption on carbon nanotubes and we found a value of about 3KJ/mol, perfectly coherent with theoretic one. Moreover, from a comparison between nanotubes and other carbon-based material (as charcoal), we noted that adsorption efficiency for CNT is almost an order of magnitude higher then charcoal. So carbon nanotubes are good candidates to cryosorbers in future accelerators. 2 As Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy application to Astrophysics we studied the effect of electron bombardment on ammonia and methane ices. The interstellar medium is composed for 99% by gas; molecules, atoms and radicals at gas state condense on dust grains surface of molecular clouds (at 10 K) creating an icy mantle with a thickness of 0.1 μm. The presence of ices is confirmed by IR spectroscopy of obscured stellar sources and in interstellar grains are localized solid mixture containing H2O, CO, CH4 and NH3. In these environments ices are subjected to chemical and physical processes, specifically to bombardment of photons and cosmic rays, with the consequent synthesis of new organic species In this work we conducted an investigation of the chemical processing of ammonia and methane ices subjected to energetic electrons. By Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy we verify the production of new organic species, after energetic irradiation in interstellar ices, as diazene (N2H2), ethane (C2H6) and acetylene (C2H2). Finally, in Geophysics and Petrology Thermal Desorption Spectroscopy can be used to study minerals chemical composition. Our interest was focused on zoisite and the sample investigated was furnished by prof. Ajò from “Institute of Inorganic Chemistry and Surfaces” of CNR, in Padova. In this work we used TDS to investigate zoisite behaviour during heating form room temperature to 650oC and to understand if its modification into tanzanite variety after heating is due to structural changes or to a dehydration mechanism.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Viaggio nel mondo dei quanti. Le avventure di Alice nel paese delle meraviglie
    (2014-11-12) Santopaolo, Valentina; Pantano, Pietro; Piperno, Francesco
    L’era digitale, internet e la multimedialità hanno notevolmente modificato il modo in cui ragazzi e adolescenti fruiscono le informazioni, rispetto alla precedente generazione. Abbiamo di fronte degli individui, i nativi digitali, che hanno accesso giornaliero ai social network, agli smartphone, alle app, tutti ricchi di contenuti multimediali che implicano una propensione verso le immagini, la lettura veloce e il multitasking. Sono cresciuti con una minore capacità di attenzione verso il testo scritto e un’attenzione più spiccata verso l’immagine. Tutto ciò deve far riflettere sulla necessità di creare nuovi modelli e contenuti per la divulgazione scientifica, che siano più appropriati e si adeguino al nuovo modo di approcciarsi e fruire le informazioni. Il presente progetto propone un prodotto multimediale che comprende il fumetto, il libro illustrato e il CD interattivo come mezzo alternativo di comunicazione e insegnamento della fisica quantistica agli adolescenti, essendo questi contenuti molto prossimi ai modelli comunicativi che risultano familiari agli adolescenti. Contenuto del progetto è una storia, con un personaggio molto noto, Alice del celebre romanzo di Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, protagonista di un viaggio “alternativo” rispetto a quello che ‘storicamente’ ha fatto. Un viaggio in un mondo popolato da elettroni, fotoni e scienziati impegnati a spiegare gli strani principi della fisica quantistica, che sembrano curiosi almeno quanto quelli del paese delle meraviglie.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Optical trapping and manipulation exploiting liquid crystalline systems
    (2012-11-30) Hernandez, Raul Josue; Versace, Carlo; Cipparrone, Gabriella
    This thesis and all the research contained within, pretends to develop new ideas and concepts on liquid crystals (LC) and optical trapping and manipulation. The combination between optical tweezers and LC systems promises unique and exciting results. The content on the thesis is presented for those with some experience in the elds of liquid crystal and optical manipulation, and for those who are interested in begin to learn about these matters, proposing an overview of much existing work and a correlation between di erent science branches like soft matter, photonics and optical control. Two main research lines has been developed involving liquid crystalline systems and polarized optical tweezers. In the rst part, nematic LC droplets in water have been adopted to study the mechanical properties of light elds with a polarization gradient, i.e. optical tweez- ers based on polarization holographic techniques with non conventional trapping in an extended interferometric optical trap. For this purpose, LC emulsions in wa- ter were prepared, obtaining droplets with radial or bipolar director con guration, which result in optically isotropic or anisotropic particles. Exploiting the vecto- rial nature of the light and its interaction with LC droplets, an unconventional opto-hydrodynamical control and trapping has been demonstrated. The planned experiments shown that a hydrodynamic force, known as Magnus force, never con- sidered in optical micromanipulation experiments, can play an important role in the optical micromanipulation and should be considered whenever particles are forced to spin and dragged in a uid. In the second part, the study was mainly focused into developing an innovative and versatile soft matter object, namely chiral-solid microspheres. They were created by combining very simple self-assembling and photoinduced processes of the soft mat- ter, i.e. photopolymerizing cholesteric LC droplets in water emulsion. The ability to control the internal helical geometry using chemical agents in the precursor LC emulsion enables to obtain solid microspheres with radial, conical, or cylindrical con gurations of the helical structures that exhibit unique optical properties. Their exclusive capabilities were demonstrated by optical manipulation experiments in- volving optical tweezers. A unique and dichotomous behavior has been revealed by polarized circularly polarized tweezers: an attractive or repulsive optical force is ex- erted by varying the light polarization. Moreover, the application of the chiral-solid microspheres as optical microresonators for creating microlasers was also demon- strated. The high performance as well as the novel and exclusive properties make these chiral microparticles good candidates for developing new concepts in colloidal materials science, microphotonics, microlasers, optical trapping and manipulation, micro- and opto uidics and microsensors.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Electronic Excitations ofGraphene, Graphene Nickel interfaces, and Carbon Nanotubes
    (2012-11-30) Pisarra, Michele; Riccardi, Pierfrancesco; Fiore, Roberto
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Aspects of Integrability in AdS/CFT duality
    (2011) Infusino, Gabriele; Rossi, Marco; Falcone, Giovanni
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Turbulence and structures in plasma astrophysics
    (2011) Donato, Sandro; Carbone, Vincenzo; Falcone, Giovanni
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    A Lévy Walk approach to the propagation of solar energetic particles
    (2013-11-26) Trotta, Enrico Maria; Bertolini, Roberto; Zimbardo, Gaetano
    This thesis is dedicated to the problem of energetic particle propagation in the solar wind, with special emphasis on the propagation of solar energetic particles (SEPs). Those particles are accelerated either in the low corona by flares, usually giving rise to so-called impulsive SEP events, or in the higher corona by the shock driven by coronal mass ejections, giving rise to the so-called gradual SEP events. In either case, energetic particles propagate in the solar wind along the spiral magnetic field, and then reach the Earth’s environment, where they can intensify the auroral emission and downgrade or even damage spacecraft operations. Indeed, SEPs represent one of the major hazards of the research programme known as space weather, which aims at reducing the risks associated with the solar and space activities. The fluxes of energetic particles measured in the Earth’s environment depend both on the source strength and on the propagation properties. Traditionally, two limiting transport regimes are considered, that is, di usive transport and scatter-free, i.e., ballistic, transport. However, in the last two decades, anomalous transport regimes in which the mean square displacement grows nonlinearly with time have become more and more common. An anomalous transport regime, either subdi usive or superdi usive, would influence in a fundamental way the flux of solar energetic particles reaching the Earth. To study this problem we have developed two approaches, one based on the analysis of SEP fluxes measured by spacecraft in the solar wind, and the other on the numerical simulation of SEPs in the case of superdi usive transport. In the first approach, we considered SEPs measurements by ACE, Wind and other spacecraft for the case o mpulsive SEP events, and compared the time profile of the energetic particles with that corresponding to the di erent forms which the propagator assumes in the case of superdi usive transport. The comparison gives direct information on the transport regime, showing that electrons propagate in a superdi usive way with anomalous di usion exponent alpha running from 1.2 to 1.75. For protons, quasi-ballistic transport regimes are also found. In the second approach, the statistical mechanism giving rise to superdi usion, namely the Lévy random walk, is investigated numerically. We developed a new numerical code which simulates the Lévy walk while changing the parameters which determine the pace of transport, that is the exponent of the power law tails of the jump probability distribution. This code reproduces well the anomalous transport predictions for the mean square displacement and for the propagator of Lévy walks, while allowing a clear and simple identification of the parameters determining the transport regime. Therefore this code represents a powerful tool to compare the simulation results to spacecraft data. Comparison with the data has been considered both for impulsive and gradual SEP events. In this thesis, we show that the numerical code reproduces well the observations o mpulsive events for the various transport regimes. Additional work is required to apply the code to the propagation of gradual SEP events, as modeling of the shock source is required. While this will be implemented in the near future, the e ectivitiy of the numerical code will allow an important improvement in the understanding of SEP propagation and in the prediction of space weather perturbations
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Air quality and pollutant modelling in the mediterranean regionDocumenti elettronici
    (2013-11-11) Gengarelli, Christian Natale; Bertolini, Roberto; Pirrone, Nicola; Carbone, Vincenzo; Hedgecock, Michael
    L'inquinamento atmosferico viene de nito come la presenza di sostanze che possono avere e etti dannosi sulla salute umana o sull'intero sistema ambientale (EC, 2008), causando e etti misurabili sugli animali, sulla vegetazione e sui diversi materiali. Queste sostanze, dette inquinanti, usualmente non sono presenti nella normale composizione atmosferica o lo sono ma a concentrazioni estremamente basse. Tra i pi u pericolosi inquinanti presenti in atmosfera c' e il mercurio (Hg), un inquinante globale sotto controllo soprattutto negli ultimi anni (UNEP, 2013b; Mason et al., 2012; Driscoll et al., 2013) in quanto provoca gravi e etti nocivi sulla salute umana. Elevate concentrazioni di mercurio negli ecosistemi sono causate dalle emissioni dirette, ma anche da reazioni chimiche che avvengono in atmosfera e dalle condizioni meteorologiche che, governate dalla sica dell'atmosfera, regolano la distribuzione, il trasporto e la deposizione del mercurio. Per individuare le cause delle elevate concentrazioni di inquinanti in atmosfera e necessaria un adeguata rete di monitoraggio, ma e molto complicato coprire vaste aree geogra che con stazioni di misura. Diviene dunque necessario ricorrere a modelli matematici che simulano le condizioni atmosferiche dal punto di vista sia meteorologico che chimico, in modo da ottenere i fattori sui quali e possibile intervenire per migliorare la qualit a dell'aria. Questo lavoro di tesi mostra lo sviluppo di un modello regionale online che simula il ciclo atmosferico del mercurio, in modo da valutare ed identi care le relazioni tra sorgenti e recettori a scala regionale e gli andamenti temporali degli scenari di emissione di mercurio attuali e futuri. Il risultato e una versione ampliata del modello numerico per la chimica ed il trasporto atmosferico WRF/Chem (modello Weather Research and Forecasting per la meteorologia integrato con la chimica atmosferica, Grell et al. (2005)), che pu o simulare il ciclo atmosferico del mercurio online. Questa versione del modello e in grado di riprodurre i campi di concentrazione ed i ussi di deposizione del mercurio a scala regionale, includendo le emissioni da sorgenti sia antropogeniche che naturali e simulando le interazioni e le reazioni chimiche che avvengono in atmosfera, nonch e i processi di deposizione. Per lo sviluppo di questo modello e stato necessario indagare i diversi aspetti della chimica del mercurio, analizzando ed implementando le interazioni con gli altri gas presenti in atmosfera, con la radiazione solare, con il vapore acqueo e con la pioggia; queste interazioni regolano i processi di ossidazione, riduzione e deposizione del mercurio. Inoltre sono stati implementati nel modello i processi di emissione da parte di sorgenti antropiche e naturali, parametrizzando le emissioni di mercurio dovute agli incendi boschivi e l'evasione di mercurio nell'interfaccia atmosfera - super ce del mare. Oltre alle deposizioni di mercurio da parte delle piogge (deposizione wet) sono stati implementati i meccanismi per deposizione al suolo dovuta alla forza gravitazionale ed ai moti atmosferici (deposizione dry). Il modello e in grado di riprodurre la variazione stagionale delle concentrazioni di mercurio, rappresentando adeguatamente anche gli andamenti di HgII e HgP nello strato atmosferico al limite con la super ce del Mar Mediterraneo (Mediterranean MBL). La medie annuali delle deposizioni di mercurio wet e dry modellate sono simili, ma con di erente distribuzione spaziale: la deposizione wet domina nelle zone umide mentre la deposizione dry e maggiore vicino alle sorgenti di emissione. Comparando le deposizioni con l'evasione di mercurio dalla super ce del mare risulta che il Mar Mediterraneo e una sorgente di mercurio per tutta l'area, con circa 70Mg di mercurio emessi in un anno. I risultati suggeriscono inoltre che nel MBL Mediterraneo il Bromo e un importante ossidante del mercurio. Il modello WRF/Chem e stato inizialmente usato per investigare la produzione fotochimica di un importante costituente atmosferico che in uenza il ciclo del mercurio nell'area del Mar Mediterraneo, l'ozono troposferico (O3). Oltre ad in uenzare il ciclo del mercurio, l'ozono e anche un pericoloso inquinante: elevate concentrazioni di ozono in prossimit a del suolo sono infatti dannose sia per la salute umana che per la produzione agricola. L'analisi modellistica dell'inquinamento da ozono troposferico mostra una forte in- uenza delle emissioni prodotte dalle navi che transitano nel Mar Mediterraneo, stimando il loro contributo in circa il 10{20% delle concentrazioni di ozono nelle aree continentali.
  • No Thumbnail Available
    Item
    Active plasmonics in soft matter doped with gold nanoparticles plasmonica attiva in materia soffice drogata con nanoparticelle d'oro
    (2013-11-29) Cataldi, Ugo; Bartolino, Roberto; Caputo, Roberto; Versace, Carlo C.
    The main objective of this study is active plasmonics. The work has been focussed on the design, characterization and theoretical interpretation of novel systems. Top-down and bottom-up, self-assembling, approaches have been utilized to realize devices where spherical gold nanoparticles have been periodically and randomly arranged. Two main paths have been followed to achieve this goal. In the first one, by utilizing a rigid periodic structure as a host platform for soft-matter (cholesteric liquid crystals) mixed with plasmonic nano-entities, was possible to obtain a chirally-organized tuneable plasmonic system. The tunability of the obtained device has been induced by applying temperature changes or external electric fields. In the second one, the surface of an elastomeric platform has been randomly covered by gold-nanoparticles. Controlled nano-chemistry processes have been successively applied to the nanoparticles (immobilized on the surface) to locally increase their size. The elastic properties of the template together with the increased size of particles have allowed a systematic study of the coupling between near-fields of the spherical nanostructures. Colloidal nano-chemistry technics have been utilized both to synthetize spherical gold nano-particles and to increase their sizes. Spectroscopic analysis has been used to analyse the response of obtained structures under electrical, thermodynamical and mechanical stimuli. SEM and TEM imaging have been exploited to study the morphology of devices, the shape of nano-structures and to measure their sizes. Moreover, from SEM images, through the use of a MatLab code written to the purpose, it has been possible to extract fundamental parameters used to perform a theoretical analysis of experimental results