Atomic and molecular junctions are an emerging class of thermoelectric materials that exploit quantum confinement effects to obtain an enhanced figure of merit. An important feature in such nanoscale systems is that the electron and heat transport become highly sensitive to the atomic configurations. Here we report the characterization of geometry-sensitive thermoelectricity in atom-sized junct...

We have used photoluminescence in pulsed sø50 Td and dc sø12 Td magnetic fields to investigate the influence of substrate orientation and growth interruption (GI) on the electronic properties of InAs/GaAs quantum dots, grown by molecular beam epitaxy at 480 °C. Dot formation is very efficient on the s100d substrate: electronic confinement is already strong without GI and no significant change i...

The two-photon absorption, 2PA, cross sections of PbS quantum dots, QDs, are theoretically and experimentally investigated and are shown to be enhanced with increasing quantum confinement. This is in contrast to our previous results for CdSe and CdTe QDs where the reduced density of states dominated and resulted in a decrease in 2PA with a decrease in QD size. Qualitatively this trend can be un...

This paper investigates the impact of quantum effects on the increase of short channel effects in III–V MOSFETs. First of all, contrary to the results obtained by other groups [1,2], quantum confinement has been found to play no role on the short channel effects occurring in the subthreshold regime. In this regime, the main origin of the increase of SCEs is simply due to the higher dielectric c...

A theoretical investigation is presented on the properties of charge transfer excitons at vertically coupled semiconductor quantum dots in the presence of electric and magnetic fields directed along the growth axis. Such excitons should have two interesting characteristics: an extremely long lifetime and a permanent dipole moment. We show that wave functions and the low-lying energies of charge...

Layered hybrid organic perovskites (HOPs) structures are a class of low-cost two-dimensional materials that exhibit outstanding optical properties, related to dielectric and quantum confinement effects. Whereas modeling and understanding of quantum confinement are well developed for conventional semiconductors, such knowledge is still lacking for 2D HOPs. In this work, concepts of effective mas...

We consider the magnetic field dependence of the chemical potential for parabolically confined quantum dots in a strong magnetic field. Approximate expressions based on the notion that the size of a dot is determined by a competition between confinement and interaction energies are shown to be consistent with exact diagonalization studies for small quantum dots. Fine structure is present in the...

This paper is dedicated to study the thin polycrystalline films of semiconductor chalcogenide materials (CdS, CdSe, and PbS) obtained by ammonia-free chemical bath deposition. The obtained material is of polycrystalline nature with crystallite of a size that, from a general point of view, should not result in any noticeable quantum confinement. Nevertheless, we were able to observe blueshift of...