In this study, the peculiarities of the transformations of gold films deposited on the Si wafer surfaces as a result of high temperature anneals are investigated experimentally depending on the conditions of wafer surface preparation and the annealing regimes. The morphology and the distribution functions of the crystallites of gold films as well as the gold droplets formed as a result of annea...

Strain-free GaAs/Al0.33Ga0.67As quantum rings are fabricated by droplet epitaxy. Both photoresponse and photoluminescence spectra confirm optical transitions in quantum rings, suggesting that droplet epitaxial nanomaterials are applicable to intermediate band solar cells. The effects of post-growth annealing on the quantum ring solar cells are investigated, and the optical properties of the sol...

The authors investigate the effect of oxygen implantation and rapid thermal annealing in ZnO/ZnMgO multiple quantum wells using photoluminescence. A blueshift in the photoluminescence is observed in the implanted samples. For a low implantation dose, a significant increase of activation energy and a slight increase of the photoluminescence efficiency are observed. This is attributed to the supp...

Here we report a simple and scalable soft-lithography-based templating technology for fabricating Au-covered oxide (titania and zirconia) gratings by using DVDs as a structural template. The resulting plasmonic gratings simultaneously exhibit very high surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensitivity (up to ∼940 nm per refractive index unit, nm per RIU) and figure of merit (FOM, up to 62.5). The eff...

Two different aspects of the thermal stability of grains were studied – (i) thermal stability of grain structure evolution during friction stir processing (FSP), and (ii) thermal stability of grains after FSP. It was concluded that Al3(Sc,Zr) dispersoids are effective in limiting grain growth to ultrafine grained regime (UFG) by stabilizing the microstructure during FSP. The presence of these d...

Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is dependent on two key hybridization events during each cycle of amplification, primer annealing and product melting. To ensure that these hybridization events occur, current PCR approaches rely on temperature set points and reaction contents that are optimized and maintained using rigid thermal cycling programs and stringent sample preparation procedures. This ...

Graphene oxide nanoribbons (GONRs) are wide bandgap semiconductors that can be reduced to metallic graphene nanoribbons. The transformation of GONRs from their semiconductive to the metallic state by annealing has attracted significant interest due to its simplicity. However, the detailed process by which GONRs transform from wide-bandgap semiconductors to semimetals with a near zero bandgap is...

The authors study the use of thin ( 230 nm) tantalum (Ta) layers on silicon (Si) as a low emissivity (high reflectivity) coating for high-temperature Si devices. Such coatings are critical to reduce parasitic radiation loss, which is one of the dominant loss mechanisms at high temperatures (above 700 C). The key factors to achieve such a coating are low emissivity in the near infrared and super...

Post-deposition rapid thermal annealing ~RTA! was performed on multilayered films consisting of a Mn capping layer on top of CoCrPt/CrTi/NiAl. High coercivities were achieved even at low M rt values and coercivity values increased more than that would have been predicted by the decrease in magnetization values. This is most likely due to the significant decrease in intergranular exchange coupli...