Identification of relaxation processes in pure polyethylene oxide (PEO) films by the dielectric permittivity and electric modulus formalisms

A distributed nanocluster based multi-agent evolutionary network

As an important approach of distributed artificial intelligence, multi-agent system provides an efficient way to solve large-scale computational problems through high-parallelism processing with nonlinear interactions between the agents. However, the huge capacity and complex distribution of the individual agents make it difficult for efficient hardware construction. Here, we propose and demonstrate a multi-agent hardware system that deploys distributed Ag nanoclusters as physical agents and their electrochemical dissolution, growth and evolution dynamics under electric field for high-parallelism exploration of the solution space. The collaboration and competition between the Ag nanoclusters allow information to be effectively expressed and processed, which therefore replaces cumbrous exhaustive operations with self-organization of Ag physical network based on the positive feedback of information interaction, leading to significantly reduced computational complexity. The proposed multi-agent network can be scaled up with parallel and serial integration structures, and demonstrates efficient solution of graph and optimization problems. An artificial potential field with superimposed attractive/repulsive components and varied ion velocity is realized, showing gradient descent route planning with self-adaptive obstacle avoidance. This multi-agent network is expected to serve as a physics-empowered parallel computing hardware.

Dielectric properties of poly-(3-octylthiophene) thin films mixed with oleic acid capped cadmium selenide nanoparticles

Hybrid heterojunction thin films, based on poly-(3-octylthiophene) (P3OT) polymer and oleic acid (OA)-capped cadmium selenide (CdSe) nanoparticles (NPs) are prepared by a spin-coating method. The structural and morphological properties of the CdSe NPs and of the hybrid thin films are investigated. The results of the dielectric characterization show that conductivity of the hybrid thin films is dependent on frequency and CdSe NP concentration. The Nyquist plots of the impedance characteristics of the layers exhibit circular features irrespective of the NP concentration. The dependence of the dielectric permittivity on frequency and CdSe NP concentration are studied.

Hybrid heterojunction thin films, based on poly-(3-octylthiophene) (P3OT) polymer and oleic acid (OA)-capped cadmium selenide (CdSe) nanoparticles (NPs) are prepared by a spin-coating method.