Assembly of sol-gel-grown $Li _{(x)} CoO_{2}$ nanocrystals through electromagnetic irradiation

We report the fabrication of assembled nanostructures from the pre-synthesized nanocrystals building blocks through optical means of exciton formation and dissociation. We demonstrate that Li (x) CoO2 nanocrystals assemble to an acicular architecture, upon prolonged exposure to ultraviolet-visible radiation emitted from a 125 W mercury vapor lamp, through intermediate excitation of excitons. The results obtained in the present study clearly show how nanocrystals of various materials with band gaps appropriate for excitations of excitons at given optical wavelengths can be assembled to unusual nanoarchitectures through illumination with incoherent light sources. The disappearance of exciton bands due to Li (x) CoO2 phase in the optical spectrum of the irradiated film comprising acicular structure is consistent with the proposed mechanism of exciton dissociation in the observed light-induced assembly process. The assembly process occurs through attractive Coulomb interactions between charged dots created upon exciton dissociation. Our work presents a new type of nanocrystal assembly process that is driven by light and exciton directed.

Analysis Of The Energy Quantization Effects On Single Electron Inverter Performance Through Noise Margin Modeling

Possible integration of Single Electron Transistor (SET) with CMOS technology is making the study of semiconductor SET more important than the metallic SET and consequently, the study of energy quantization effects on semiconductor SET devices and circuits is gaining significance. In this paper, for the first time, the effects of energy quantization on SET inverter performance are examined through analytical modeling and Monte Carlo simulations. It is observed that the primary effect of energy quantization is to change the Coulomb Blockade region and drain current of SET devices and as a result affects the noise margin, power dissipation, and the propagation delay of SET inverter. A new model for the noise margin of SET inverter is proposed which includes the energy quantization effects. Using the noise margin as a metric, the robustness of SET inverter is studied against the effects of energy quantization. It is shown that SET inverter designed with CT : CG = 1/3 (where CT and CG are tunnel junction and gate capacitances respectively) offers maximum robustness against energy quantization.

Ultrasonic attenuation in strongly disordered electronic systems

The attenuation of long-wavelength phonons due to their interaction with electronic excitations in disordered systems is investigated here. Lattice strain couples to electronic stress, and thus ultrasonic attenuation measures electronic viscosity. The enhancement and critical divergence of electronic viscosity due to localization effects is calculated for the first time. Experimental consequences for the anomalous increase of ultrasonic attenuation in disordered metals close to the metal-insulator transition are discussed. In the localized regime, the appropriate model is one of electronic two-level systems (TLS’s) coupled to phonons. The TLS consists of a pair of states with one localized state occupied and the other unoccupied. The density of such low-excitation-energy TLS’s is nonzero due to long-range Coulomb interactions. The question of whether these could be significant low-energy excitations in glasses is touched upon.

Modeling and analysis of energy quantization effects on single electron inverter performance

In this paper, for the first time, the effects of energy quantization on single electron transistor (SET) inverter performance are analyzed through analytical modeling and Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that energy quantization mainly changes the Coulomb blockade region and drain current of SET devices and thus affects the noise margin, power dissipation, and the propagation delay of SET inverter. A new analytical model for the noise margin of SET inverter is proposed which includes the energy quantization effects. Using the noise margin as a metric, the robustness of SET inverter is studied against the effects of energy quantization. A compact expression is developed for a novel parameter quantization threshold which is introduced for the first time in this paper. Quantization threshold explicitly defines the maximum energy quantization that an SET inverter logic circuit can withstand before its noise margin falls below a specified tolerance level. It is found that SET inverter designed with CT:CG=1/3 (where CT and CG are tunnel junction and gate capacitances, respectively) offers maximum robustness against energy quantization.

Thermodynamic scaling theory for the two-impurity Anderson model

We present results of a study of the two-impurity Anderson model using a thermodynamic scaling theory developed recently. The model is characterized by the Coulomb energy U, the orbital energy epsilond, the d-level width Gamma, and the separation between impurities R. If Gamma<<−epsilond<~Gamma. Here we find that the single-impurity physics dominates the low-temperature behavior, and impurity-impurity interactions are perturbative. The qualitative features of the temperature-dependent susceptibility are discussed. Journal of Applied Physics is copyrighted by The American Institute of Physics.

Metal-insulator transition of naxwo3 studied by angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy

The electronic structure of sodium tungsten bronzes NaxWO3 is investigated by high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). The ARPES spectra measured in both insulating and metallic phases of NaxWO3 reveals the origin of metal-insulator transition (MIT) in sodium tungsten bronze system. It is found that in insulating NaxWO3 the states near the Fermi level (E-F) are localized due to the strong disorder caused by the random distribution of Na+ ions in WO3 lattice. Due to the presence of disorder and long-range Coulomb interaction of conduction electrons, a soft Coulomb gap arises, where the density of states vanishes exactly at E-F. In the metallic regime the states near E-F are populated and the Fermi level shifts upward rigidly with increasing electron doping (x). Volume of electron-like Fermi surface (FS) at the Gamma(X) point of the Brillouin zone gradually increases with increasing Na concentration due to W 5d t(2g) band filling. A rigid shift of the Fermi energy is found to give a qualitatively good description of the Fermi surface evolution. As we move from bulk-sensitive to more surface sensitive photon energy, we found the emergence of Fermi surfaces at X(M) and M(R) point similar to the one at the Gamma(X) point in the metallic regime, suggesting that the reconstruction of surface was due to rotation/deformation of WO6 octahedra.

Quasiequilibrium optical nonlinearities from spin-polarized carriers in GaAs

Semiconductor Bloch equations, which microscopically describe the dynamics of a Coulomb interacting, spin-unpolarized electron-hole plasma, can be solved in two limits: the coherent and the quasiequilibrium regimes. These equations have been recently extended to include the spin degree of freedom and used to explain spin dynamics in the coherent regime. In the quasiequilibrium limit, one solves the Bethe-Salpeter equation in a two-band model to describe how optical absorption is affected by Coulomb interactions within a spin unpolarized plasma of arbitrary density. In this work, we modified the solution of the Bethe-Salpeter equation to include spin polarization and light holes in a three-band model, which allowed us to account for spin-polarized versions of many-body effects in absorption. The calculated absorption reproduced the spin-dependent, density-dependent, and spectral trends observed in bulk GaAs at room temperature, in a recent pump-probe experiment with circularly polarized light. Hence, our results may be useful in the microscopic modeling of density-dependent optical nonlinearities due to spin-polarized carriers in semiconductors.

Theory of the unusual doping and temperature dependence of photoemission spectra in manganites

A recent, major, puzzle in the core-level photoemission spectra of doped manganites is the observation of a 1–2 eV wide shoulder with intensity varying with temperature T as the square of the magnetization over a T scale of order 200 K, an order of magnitude less than electronic energies. This is addressed and resolved here, by extending a recently proposed two-fluid polaron–mobile electron model for these systems to include core-hole effects. The position of the shoulder is found to be determined by Coulomb and Jahn-Teller energies, while its spectral weight is determined by the mobile electron energetics which is strongly T and doping dependent, due to annealed disorder scattering from the polarons and the t2g core spins. Our theory accounts quantitatively for the observed T dependence of the difference spectra, and furthermore, explains the observed correspondence between spectral changes due to increasing doping and decreasing T.

Analysis of Energy Quantization Effects on Single-Electron Transistor Circuits

In this paper, the effects of energy quantization on different single-electron transistor (SET) circuits (logic inverter, current-biased circuits, and hybrid MOS-SET circuits) are analyzed through analytical modeling and Monte Carlo simulations. It is shown that energy quantizationmainly increases the Coulomb blockade area and Coulomb blockade oscillation periodicity, and thus, affects the SET circuit performance. A new model for the noise margin of the SET inverter is proposed, which includes the energy quantization effects. Using the noise margin as a metric, the robustness of the SET inverter is studied against the effects of energy quantization. An analytical expression is developed, which explicitly defines the maximum energy quantization (termed as ``quantization threshold'') that an SET inverter can withstand before its noise margin falls below a specified tolerance level. The effects of energy quantization are further studiedfor the current-biased negative differential resistance (NDR) circuitand hybrid SETMOS circuit. A new model for the conductance of NDR characteristics is also formulated that explains the energy quantization effects.

Non-Fermi liquid theory of quantum hall effects

Within the Grassmannian U(2N)/U(N) x U(N) nonlinear sigma-model representation of localization, one can study the low-energy dynamics of both a free and interacting electron gas. We study the crossover between these two fundamentally different physical problems. We show how the topological arguments for the exact quantization of the Hall conductance are extended to include the Coulomb interaction problem. We discuss dynamical scaling and make contact with the theory of variable range hopping. (C) 2005 Pleiades Publishing, Inc.

Free-to-bound and bound exciton transitions at isoelectronic impurities: GaP(Zn,O)

We show, for sufficiently high temperatures and sufficiently weak majority-carrier binding energies, that the dominant radiative transition at an isoelectronic acceptor (donor) in p-type (n-type) material consists of the recombination of singly trapped minority carriers (bound by central-cell forces) with free majority carriers attracted by a Coulomb interaction. There are two reasons why the radiative recombination rate of the free-to-bound process is greater than the bound exciton process, which dominates at lower temperatures: (i) The population of free majority-carrier states greatly exceeds that of exciton states at higher temperatures, and (ii) the oscillator strength of the free-to-bound transition is greatly enhanced by the Coulomb attraction between the free carrier and the charged isoelectronic impurity. This enhancement is important for isoelectronic centers and is easily calculable from existing exciton models. We show that the free carrier attracted by a Coulomb interaction can be viewed as a continuum excited state of the bound exciton. When we apply the results of our calculations to the GaP(Zn, O) system, we find that the major part of the room-temperature luminescence from nearest-neighbor isoelectronic Zn-O complexes results from free-to-bound recombination and not exciton recombination as has been thought previously. Recent experiments on impulse excitation of luminescence in GaP(Zn, O) are reevaluated in the light of our calculations and are shown to be consistent with a strong free-to-bound transition. For deep isoelectronic centers with weakly bound majority carriers, we predict an overwhelming dominance of the free-to-bound process at 300°K.

Lattice vibrations and specific heat of zinc blende

The dispersion relations, frequency distribution function and specific heat of zinc blende have been calculated using Houston's method on (1) A short range force (S. R.) model of the type employed in diamond by Smith and (2) A long range model assuming an effective charge Ze on the ions. Since the elastic constant data on ZnS are not in agreement with one another the following values were used in these calculations: {Mathematical expression}. As compared to the results on the S. R. model, the Coulomb force causes 1. A splitting of the optical branches at (000) and a larger dispersion of these branches; 2. A rise in the acoustic frequency branches the effect being predominant in a transverse acoustic branch along [110]; 3. A bridging of the gap of forbidden frequencies in the S. R. model; 4. A reduction of the moments of the frequency distribution function and 5. A flattening of the Θ- T curve. By plotting (Θ/Θ0) vs. T., the experimental data of Martin and Clusius and Harteck are found to be in perfect coincidence with the curve for the short range model. The values of the elastic constants deduced from the ratio Θ0 (Theor)/Θ0 (Expt) agree with those of Prince and Wooster. This is surprising as several lines of evidence indicate that the bond in zinc blende is partly covalent and partly ionic. The conclusion is inescapable that the effective charge in ZnS is a function of the wave vector {Mathematical expression}.

Intrinsic Electron localization in manganites

We mention here an unusual disorder effect in manganites, namely the ubiquitous hopping behavior for electron transport observed in them over a wide range of doping. We argue that the implied Anderson localization is intrinsic to manganites, because of the existence of polarons in them which are spatially localized, generally at random sites (unless there is polaron ordering). We have developed a microscopic two fluid lb model for manganites, where l denotes lattice site localized l polarons, and b denotes band electrons. Using this, and the self-consistent theory of localization, we show that the occupied b states are Anderson localized in a large range of doping due to the scattering of b electrons from l polarons. Numerical simulations which further include the effect of long range Coulomb interactions support this, as well the existence of a novel polaronic Coulomb glass. A consequence is the inevitable hopping behaviour for electron transport observed in doped insulating manganites.

Nonlinear intrinsic instability of solid propellant combustion including gas-phase thermal inertia

The problem of homogeneous solid propellant combustion instability is studied with a one-dimensional flame model, including the effects of gas-phase thermal inertia and nonlinearity. Computational results presented in this paper show nonlinear instabilities inherent in the equations, due to which periodic burning is found even under steady ambient conditions such as pressure. The stability boundary is obtained in terms of Denison-Baum parameters. It is found that inclusion of gas-phase thermal inertia stabilizes the combustion. Also, the effect of a distributed heat release in the gas phase, compared to the flame sheet model, is to destabilize the burning. Direct calculations for finite amplitude pressure disturbances show that two distinct resonant modes exist, the first one near the natural frequency as obtained from intrinsic instability analysis and a second mode occurring at a much higher driving frequency. It is found that er rn in the low frequency region, the response of the propellant is significantly affected by the specific type of gas-phase chemical heat-release model employed. Examination of frequency response function reveals that the role of gas-phase thermal inertia is to stabilize the burning near the first resonant mode. Calculations made for different amplitudes of driving pressure show that the mean burning rate decreases with increasing amplitude. Also, with an increase in the driving amplitude, higher harmonics are generated in the burning rate.

Hole pairing within an extended Anderson impurity model applicable to the high-Tc cuprates

We calculate the binding energy of a hole pair within the extended Anderson Hamiltonian for the high-Tc cuprates including a Cu impurity and an oxygen-derived band. The results indicate that stable hole pairs can be formed for intra-atomic and interatomic Coulomb repulsion strengths larger than 6 and 3.5 eV, respectively. It is also shown that the total hybridization strength between the Cu 3d and oxygen p band should be less than 2.5 eV. The hole pairing takes place primarily within the oxygen-derived p band. The range of parameter values for which hole pairing occurs is also consistent with the earlier photoemission results from these cuprates.