The radiation hardness of diamonds makes them a strong candidate to replace the inner most part of the CMS tracking detector. Polycrystalline diamond has been shown to regain some its CCD under sub-bandgap irradiations due to the depolarization of the diamond sensor. Monocrystalline diamonds that have suffered proton radiation damage exhibit a similar CCD reduction due to polarization. This stu...

Non-destructive, three-dimensional (3D) characterization of the grain structure in mono-phase polycrystalline materials is an open challenge in material science. Recent advances in synchrotron based X-ray imaging and diffraction techniques offer interesting possibilities for mapping 3D grain shapes and crystallographic orientations for certain categories of polycrystalline materials. Direct vis...

Graphene produced by chemical vapor deposition (CVD) is polycrystalline, and scattering of charge carriers at grain boundaries (GBs) could degrade its performance relative to exfoliated, single-crystal graphene. However, the electrical properties of GBs have so far been addressed indirectly without simultaneous knowledge of their locations and structures. We present electrical measurements on i...

Recently, bulk superconductivity at ambient pressure in polycrystalline pressed samples of an organic metal a,-(BEDT-TTF),I, was observed."' This is a remarkable fact because this finding shows that organic superconductors can in principle be used for the production of electronic devices, such as squids, and might even be suitable for the preparation of superconducting cables similar to the hig...

Scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) imaging is applied to analyze the electromigration-induced thickness variations of thin polycrystalline films. It is shown that a high angle annular dark field (HAADF) detector is required to minimize the effect of diffraction contact. A further reduction of the diffraction contrast can be obtained using a tilt series. A correlation between the i...

The square arrays are fabricated by e-beam lithography on polycrystalline Co sputtered on glass substrates. First, a continuous layer, 1000 nm thick, of polycrystalline Co is grown. This thickness guarantees optical opacity for the light used in the experiments, a 632.8 nm wavelength 1.5 mW laser. Secondly, the continuous Co layer is locally etched (all the way through to the glass substrate) t...

We show that the cubic nonlinear response of a polycrystalline quasi-one-dimensional conductor, such as a conducting polymer, can be expressed exactly in terms of the single-crystal cubic susceptibility and the electric fields in the analogous linear polymer. We also propose a simple nonlinear decoupling approximation which allows the polycrystalline nonlinear susceptibility to be simply estima...

Polycrystalline silicon nanowires are synthesized using a classical fabrication method commonly used in microelectronic industry: the sidewall spacer formation technique. Assets of this technological process rest on low cost lithographic tools use, classical silicon planar technology compatibility and the possibility to get by direct patterning numerous parallel nanowires with precise location ...

We investigated the thermoelectric properties of Cl-doped polycrystalline compounds In4Pb0.01Sn0.03Se2.9Clx (x = 0.02, 0.04, and 0.06). X-ray diffraction measurement shows a gradual change in lattice volume for x ≤ 0.04 without any impurity phases indicating a systemic change in Cl doping. The Cl doping in the compounds has the effect of increasing carrier concentration and the effective mass o...

First-principles modeling of grain boundaries (GB) in CuInSe2 semiconductors reveals that an energetic barrier exists for holes arriving from the grain interior (GI) to the GB. Consequently, the absence of holes inside the GB prevents GB electrons from recombining. At the same time, the GI is purer in polymaterials than in single crystals, since impurities segregated to the GBs. This explains t...