Aluminum Nitride (AlN) has been long time being regarded as highly interesting material for developing sensing applications (including biosensors and implantable sensors). AlN, due to its appealing electronic properties, is envisaged lately to serve as a multi-functional biosensing platform. Although generally exploited for its intrinsic piezoelectricity, its surface morphology and mechanical p...

Enhancementand depletion-mode AlN/GaN HFETs have been fabricated with a subcritical barrier design: a twodimensional electron gas (2DEG) is induced in the highly resistive as-grown heterostructure when a suitable capping material is deposited over the ultrathin AlN barrier. In this bottom-up approach 2DEGs can be locally induced by patterned cap layers on subcritical barrier AlN/GaN heterostruc...

The effect of the structural inhomogeneity and oxygen defects on the thermal conductivity of polycrystalline aluminum nitride (AlN) thin films deposited on single-crystal silicon substrates is experimentally and theoretically investigated. The influence of the evolution of crystal structure, grain size, and out-of plane disorientation along the cross plane of the films on their thermal conducti...

Liquid-phase bonding is a technologically important method to fabricate high-performance metal/ceramic heterostructures used for power electronic devices. However, the atomic-scale mechanisms of how these two dissimilar crystals specifically bond at the interfaces are still not well understood. Here we analyse the atomically-resolved structure of a liquid-phase bonded heterointerface between Al...

By conventional transmission electron microscopy (CTEM) investigations on 2H-AlN films grown by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy (MBE) on Si(001) the influence of the offaxis angle of the substrate surface on the film structure was studied. Three types of Si(001) substrates were used: on-axis, ~1°, and ~5° off-axis Si(001) substrates. The AlN layer on an exact oriented Si(001) substrates ...

The antiresorptive drug elcatonin (ECT) is known to relieve pain in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. A prospective open-labeled trial was conducted to compare the effects of short-term combined treatment with alendronate (ALN) and ECT on bone mineral density (BMD) and bone turnover with those of single treatment with ALN in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. Two hundred and five pos...

INTRODUCTION Lymph node metastases are the most significant prognostic factors in patients with breast carcinoma. A positive sentinel lymph node (SLN) biopsy is followed by an axillary lymph node (ALN) dissection. In sentinel lymph node negative cases the risk of positive non-sentinel ALN is very low though not absent. The aim of this study was to determine predictive factors for non-sentinel l...

We report on the oxidation behavior of AlN/CrN multilayers at 900 °C, deposited by radio frequency magnetron sputtering. It is shown that oxidation in this system is controlled by diffusion of Cr towards the surface and formation of Cr2O3. Cr diffusion is found to mainly occur along grain boundaries. Thus, coherent cubic AlN/CrN multilayer regions with coarse columnar grain structures are found...

To improve the growth rate and crystal quality of AlN, the competitive growth mechanisms of AlN under different parameters were studied. The mass transport limited mechanism was competed with the gas-phase parasitic reaction and became dominated at low reactor pressure. The mechanism of strain relaxation at the AlN/Si interface was studied by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Improved dep...

Thermal treatment of supersaturated Ti1!xAlxN films (x " 0.67) with a dominant ternary cubic-phase were performed in the 700– 1000 !C range. Grazing incidence X-ray diffraction (GIXRD) shows that, for annealing temperatures up to 800 !C, the film structure undergoes the formation of coherent cubic AlN (c-AlN) and TiN (c-TiN) nanocrystallites via spinodal decomposition and, at higher temperature...