The controlled introduction of dopant atoms to semiconducting host materials is the corner stone of electronic device fabrication. Dopant atoms provide a means to modulate the electronic, optical, and magnetic properties of semiconductors [1], and it is now possible to control dopant profiles with true atomic-scale precision in the laboratory [2]. Moreover, industrial fabrication methods are no...

Applying a voltage difference between a conductor and a sessile droplet sitting on a thin dielectric film separating it from the conductor will cause the drop to spread. When the conductor is a good metal, the change of the drop’s contact angle due to the voltage is given the Young-Lippmann equation. Here we report experiments with lightly-doped, single crystal silicon as the conductive electro...

The diffraction of light by a non­ permanent grating was first demonstrated using a grating-like structure induced by ultrasonic waves that were passed into a crystal. The invention of the laser with its extraordinary coherence then made it pos­ sible to use the interference between light waves to create transient gratings in various media such as solids, liquids with saturable absorption, and ...

In the past several decades, semiconductor materials have been used in a wide range of electronic devices. These devices include transistors, light emitting diodes, lasers, photodetectors, solar cells, and many more. Given such an impressive range of applications, one might wonder what makes semiconductors so different from other materials? At the heart of it, semiconductors are different from ...

Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors provide a unique opportunity for optoelectronics due to their layered atomic structure, electronic and optical properties. To date, a majority of the application-oriented research in this field has been focused on fieldeffect electronics as well as photodetectors and light emitting diodes. Here we present a perspective on the use of 2D semiconductors for phot...

Isothermal close space sublimation, a simple and low-cost physical vapour transport technique, was used to infiltrate ZnTe and CdSe semiconductors in porous silicon. The structure of the embedded materials was determined by X-ray diffraction analysis while Rutherford backscattering spectra allowed determining the composition profiles of the samples. In both cases, a constant composition of the ...

Doping semiconductors is an important step for their technological application. While doping bulk semiconductors can be easily achieved, incorporating dopants in semiconductor nanostructures has proven difficult. Here, we report a facile synthesis method for doping titanium-dioxide (TiO₂) nanotubes that was enabled by a new electrochemical cell design. A variety of optical, electronic and magne...

Two aspects related to valence-band hole spin are considered: spin surfaces in p-type semiconductors and flipping of the hole spin by an ultrashort electric field pulse. It is shown that heavy, light, and split-off holes have different spin surfaces. In general, the shape of the surface in real semiconductors may depend on the hole wave vector direction and magnitude. The concept of spin surfac...

Organic small molecule semiconductors have many advantages over their polymer analogues. However, to fabricate organic semiconductor-based devices using solution processing, it is requisite to eliminate dewetting to ensure film uniformity and desirable to assemble nanoscopic features with tailored macroscopic alignment without compromising their electronic properties. To this end, we present a ...

The development of semiconductor electronics is reviewed briefly, beginning with the development of germanium devices (band gap E g = 0.66 eV) after World War II. A tendency towards alternative materials with wider band gaps quickly became apparent, starting with silicon (E g = 1.12 eV). This improved the signal-to-noise ratio for classical electronic applications. Both semiconductors have a te...