Several methods have been proposed and tried for strain analysis of a crystal on nano-scale. Diffractometry such as nano-beam diffraction [1] and convergent-beam electron diffraction [2][3], and the phase imaging methods such as dark-filed electron holography [4] and high-resolution electron microscopy [5] have been applied to this issue. In scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM), whe...

Our combined experimental and theoretical analysis of the shifts, with particle size, of core-level binding energies (BE's) of metal nanoparticles on insulating supports, shows that these shifts have an important initial state contribution arising, in large part, because of lattice strain. This contribution of BE shifts has not been recognized previously. Lattice strain changes the chemical bon...

We present first-principles calculations of electronic structures of a class of two-dimensional (2D) honeycomb structures of group-V binary compounds. Our results show these new 2D materials are stable semiconductors with direct or indirect band gaps. The band gap can be tuned by applying lattice strain. During their stretchable regime, they all exhibit metal-indirect gap semiconductor-direct g...

There has been increasing appreciation over recent years of the importance of the studies reported by Gorsky in the 1930s concerning the influences of strain gradients on the processes of diffusion in metals (1-3). These strain gradients can, for example, be produced by mechanical bending. As a particular case of strain induced diffusion, evidence has been obtained from anelastic effects-such a...

The deformation potentials a, b and d for GaAs have been determined from polarized photoluminescence measurements upon a set of epitaxially grown strained.GaAs structures possessing varying levels of compressive biaxial lattice strain. X-ray diffraction measurements yield values for the degree of lattice strain while the polarized photoluminescence measurements permit a separate determination o...

Monte Carlo simulations of anomalous ion channeling in near-lattice-matched AlInN/GaN bilayers allow an accurate determination of the strain state of AlInN by Rutherford backscattering or channeling. Although these strain estimates agree well with x-ray diffraction (XRD) results, XRD composition estimates are shown to have limited accuracy, due to a possible deviation from Vegard's law, which w...

We have observed a novel modification of a surface state due to a local strain field induced by a nanopattern formation. N adsorption on the Cu(100) surface induces a nanoscale grid pattern, where the clean Cu regions remain periodically. The lattice is contracted on the clean region by adjacent c(2 x 2)N domains, which have a larger lattice constant. On this patterned surface, we have investig...