The subject of the paper is Schrdinger operators on tree graphs which are radial, having the branching number bn at all the vertices at the distance tn from the root. We consider a family of coupling conditions at the vertices characterized by (bn1)2+4 real parameters. We prove that if the graph is sparse so that there is a subsequence of {tn+1tn} growing to infinity, in the absence of the potential the absolutely continuous spectrum is empty for a large subset of these vertex couplings, but on the the other hand, there are cases when the spectrum of such a Schrdinger operator can be purely absolutely continuous.

Some electromagnetic materials exhibit, in a given frequency range, effective dielectric permittivity and/or magnetic permeability which are negative. In the literature, they are called negative index materials, left-handed materials or meta-materials. We propose in this paper a numerical method to solve a wave transmission between a classical dielectric material and a meta-material. The method we investigate can be considered as an alternative method compared to the method presented by the second author and co-workers. In particular, we shall use the abstract framework they developed to prove well-posedness of the exact problem. We recast this problem to fit later discretization by the staggered discontinuous Galerkin method developed by the first author and co-worker, a method which relies on introducing an auxiliary unknown. Convergence of the numerical method is proven, with the help of explicit infsup

In this paper, we attempt to reconstruct one of the last and incomplete projects of Volodya Geyler. We study the motion of a quantum particle in the plane to which a halfline lead is attached, assuming that the particle has spin and the plane component of the Hamiltonian contains a spin-orbit interaction, of Rashba or Dresselhaus type. We construct a class of admissible Hamiltonians and derive an explicit expression for the Green function, which is applied to scattering in a system of this kind.

In this paper, gold ball wire bonding at low temperature using a high frequency transducer was evaluated. The substrates used were FR-4 laminates with two different gold-plated surface finishes: electrolytic and immersion gold-plated. Bonding temperatures of 120/spl deg/C, 80/spl deg/C and 40/spl deg/C were investigated with 1 mil fine pitch gold wire. Prior to wire bonding, the laminates and dice were plasma treated. The surfaces were analyzed prior to and after plasma treatment before wire bonding using XPS and AFM. Bonded areas were also analyzed using SEM. Design of experiment (DOE) techniques have been employed to optimize the bonding parameters at each temperature. The response of the DOE was evaluated by using bond shear and bond pull. The results show that bonding at low temperature is viable with the use of a high frequency transducer wire bonder.

The initial decay rate of a mixed state is discussed; is shown to be zero for finite energy states. In the previous paper [1] we investigated a general scheme for description of unstable systems. One of our results concerned the initial decay rate. Generalizing the earlier results of Horwitz and Marchand (see [2] and other references contained in [1]) we proved there, that the initial decay rate of any pure state of the unstable system equals to zero, if this state is so called finite energy state. Here we shall be interested in the same problem, assuming now the state of the decaying system to be in general mixed. Such assumption seems to be reasonable: firstly, from the point of view of an experiment it is too restrictive to treat only pure states of unstable systems. In particular, mixed states are generally considered in the recent studies about the influence of measuring devices on the time evolution of the unstable system [3