Scanning electron microscopy, spectroscopic ellipsometry, and current-voltage and current-temperature measurements were employed to characterize nanowhisker structures grown by molecular-beam epitaxy on Si(111) substrates. Small clusters of gold deposited on the Si surface were used as the seeds for nanowhisker growth. The diameter of grown nanowhiskers and their length ranged from 70 to 200 nm...

A hybrid molecular dynamics model has been applied for modeling impacts of Ar and decaborane clusters, with energies ranging from 25 to 1500 eV/atom, impacting Si surfaces. Crater formation, sputtering, and the shapes of craters and rims were studied. Our simulation predicts that on a Si(1 0 0), craters are nearly triangular in cross-section, with the facets directed along the close-packed (1 1...

Using the new MIAMI facility at the University of Huddersfield, an in-situ TEM study has been carried out on the effects of helium implantation on a tri-layer system consisting of monocrystalline silicon (c-Si), silicon dioxide (SiO2) and polycrystalline silicon (poly-Si). Co-irradiation of these three components enabled direct comparisons to be made of differences between the response of c-Si ...

We studied the temperature and abundance distributions of intra-cluster medium (ICM) in the Abell 262 cluster of galaxies observed with Suzaku. Abell 262 is a bright, nearby poor cluster with ICM temperature of ∼ 2 keV, thus providing useful information about the connection of ICM properties between groups and clusters of galaxies. The observed spectrum of the central region was well-represente...

Spectroscopic and theoretical investigations have been carried out for neutral phenol-triethylsilane clusters to reveal an intrinsic nature of the Si-H···H-O type dihydrogen bond. On the basis of the laser-induced fluorescence and infrared spectra, four isomers are identified. Three of them have a structure in which the dihydrogen bond and the dispersion interaction are competing in the stabili...

We describe two new approaches to the patterning of Si(1 0 0) surfaces for controlled nucleation of heteroepitaxial Ge semiconductor clusters. In the first method, a Ga -focused ion beam in situ to the growth chamber is used to create local regions of enhanced Ga concentration and surface topography. It is shown that at low ion doses ( /10 cm ), implanted Ga causes local nucleation of Ge cluste...

The effects of doping bare silicon clusters with carbon on their physical properties are of fundamental interest for the chemistry of the interstellar medium and the development of novel nanostructures in materials science. Carbon-doped silicon clusters (SinC, n = 3-8) are characterized in the gas phase with infrared-ultraviolet two-color ionization (IR-UV2CI) spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, a...

Infrared spectra of young stellar clusters in the Magellanic Clouds are used to derive information on the red supergiants dominating their 1.6 m emission, and to obtain a new and independent estimate of their metallicities. The most striking result is that red supergiants with low metallicity appear to be much cooler than predicted by evolutionary models, and this most probably reflects uncerta...

AuSin − (n = 4−12) clusters were produced with a laser vaporization source and investigated by photoelectron spectroscopy. The swarm-intelligence-based CALYPSO structure search method and ab initio calculations were employed to determine their ground-state structures. The results revealed that the most stable isomers of AuSin − (n = 4−12) cluster anions are all exohedral structures, in which th...