In the past ten years we have witnessed a revival of, and subsequent rapid expansion in, the research on zinc oxide (ZnO) as a semiconductor. Being initially considered as a substrate for GaN and related alloys, the availability of high-quality large bulk single crystals, the strong luminescence demonstrated in optically pumped lasers and the prospects of gaining control over its electrical con...

Skutterudite materials have been considered as promising thermoelectric candidates due to intrinsically good electrical conductivity and tailorable thermal conductivity. Options for improving thermal-to-electrical conversion efficiency include identifying novel materials, adding filler atoms, and substitutional dopants. Incorporating filler or substitutional dopant atoms in the skutterudite com...

The band structure and the optical conductivity of an ABA (Bernal-type) stacked graphene trilayer are calculated. It is shown that, under appropriate doping, a strong resonant peak develops in the optical conductivity, located at the frequency corresponding to approximately 1.4 times the interlayer hopping energy and caused by the 'nesting' of two nearly parabolic bands in the electronic spectr...

Using time-resolved far-infrared spectroscopy, we observe multiple routes for photoinduced phase transitions in V(2)O(3). This includes (i) a photothermal antiferromagnetic to paramagnetic transition and (ii) an incipient strain-generated paramagnetic metal to paramagnetic insulator transition, which manifests as coherent oscillations in the far-infrared conductivity. The ∼100 ps conductivity o...

We present a model to describe electrical conductivity along the DNA double helix. In this model, DNA is considered as a one-dimensional disordered system, and electrons are transported via variable range hopping between localized states. Thermal structural fluctuations in DNA further localize electronic wave functions, giving rise to a temperature-dependent localization length. The model quant...

Local electrical imaging using microwave impedance microscope is performed on graphene in different modalities, yielding a rich hierarchy of the local conductivity. The low-conductivity graphite oxide and its derivatives show significant electronic inhomogeneity. For the conductive chemical graphene, the residual defects lead to a systematic reduction of the microwave signals. In contrast, the ...

We report on the thermal conductivity of tin-doped bismuth between 50 mK and 27 K. A quantitative interpretation of the data is presented. At the lowest temperatures the electronic thermal conductivity dominates, but above 0.1 K lattice waves carry most of the heat. Below 1 K phononsare scatteredmostly by crystal boundaries, while near the dielectric maximum point defects are important. Their s...

Single-walled carbon nanotubes were chemically functionalized by virtue of the interactions between the nanotube-bound carboxylic moieties and octadecylamine ligands. The electronic conductivity properties of the resulting nanotubes were probed voltammetrically. Two approaches were employed. The first entailed the fabrication of a nanotube monolayer at the air|water interface and the conductivi...