A silicon micromachined photonic band gap cell, characteristics and an application

A novel PBG cell based on micromachining of Silicon using wet anisotropic etching has been considered. Since this is based on etching of the Silicon substrate, it is amenable to fabrication with standard Silicon processes and integration with millimeter wave circuits. We characterize this kind of PBG cell by full wave simulations using a time domain code. For the purpose of characterization, the scenario of a 50 ohm microstrip line placed on a Silicon substrate which is anisotropically etched to create patterns with sloping walls is considered. This is shown to produce the well known PBG response of stop bands in certain frequency bands. We look at the variation in the transmission coefficient (S-21) response as the number of periods, length based average fill factor and depth of micromachining are varied. One application of a low pass filter has been proposed and simulated results are given.

Performance Analysis of Guidance Laws Based on Timescale Gap

An analytical treatment of performance analysis of guidance laws is possible only in simplistic scenarios. As the complexity of the guidance system increases, a search for analytical solutions becomes quite impractical. In this paper, a new performance measure, based upon the notion of a timescale gap that can be computed through numerical simulations, is developed for performance analysis of guidance laws. Finite time Lyapunov exponents are used to define the timescale gap. It is shown that the timescale gap can be used for quantification of the rate of convergence of trajectories to the collision course. Comparisonbetween several guidance laws, based on the timescale gap, is presented. Realistic simulations to study the effect of aerodynamicsand atmospheric variations on the timescale gap of these guidance laws are also presented.

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.

GAP-RBF based NR image quality measurement for JPEG coded images

In this paper, we present a growing and pruning radial basis function based no-reference (NR) image quality model for JPEG-coded images. The quality of the images are estimated without referring to their original images. The features for predicting the perceived image quality are extracted by considering key human visual sensitivity factors such as edge amplitude, edge length, background activity and background luminance. Image quality estimation involves computation of functional relationship between HVS features and subjective test scores. Here, the problem of quality estimation is transformed to a function approximation problem and solved using GAP-RBF network. GAP-RBF network uses sequential learning algorithm to approximate the functional relationship. The computational complexity and memory requirement are less in GAP-RBF algorithm compared to other batch learning algorithms. Also, the GAP-RBF algorithm finds a compact image quality model and does not require retraining when the new image samples are presented. Experimental results prove that the GAP-RBF image quality model does emulate the mean opinion score (MOS). The subjective test results of the proposed metric are compared with JPEG no-reference image quality index as well as full-reference structural similarity image quality index and it is observed to outperform both.

Angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy of the insulating NaxWO3: Anderson localization, polaron formation, and remnant Fermi surface

The electronic structure of the insulating sodium tungsten bronze, Na0.025WO3, is investigated by high-resolution angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. We find that near-E-F states are localized due to the strong disorder arising from random distribution of Na+ ions in the WO3 lattice, which makes the system insulating. The temperature dependence of photoemission spectra provides direct evidence for polaron formation. The remnant Fermi surface of the insulator is found to be the replica of the real Fermi surface in the metallic system

External Bias Dependent Direct To Indirect Band Gap Transition in Graphene Nanoribbon

In this work, using self-consistent tight-binding calculations. for the first time, we show that a direct to indirect band gap transition is possible in an armchair graphene nanoribbon by the application of an external bias along the width of the ribbon, opening up the possibility of new device applications. With the help of the Dirac equation, we qualitatively explain this band gap transition using the asymmetry in the spatial distribution of the perturbation potential produced inside the nanoribbon by the external bias. This is followed by the verification of the band gap trends with a numerical technique using Magnus expansion of matrix exponentials. Finally, we show that the carrier effective masses possess tunable sharp characters in the vicinity of the band gap transition points.

On the paradoxical relation between the melting temperature and forbidden energy gap of nanoparticles

We comment on the paradox that seems to exist about a correlation between the size-dependent melting temperature and the forbidden energy gap of nanoparticles. By analyzing the reported expressions for the melting temperature and the band gap of nanoparticles, we conclude that there exists a relation between these two physical quantities. However, the variations of these two quantities with size for semiconductors are different from that of metals. (C) 2010 American Institute of Physics.[doi:10.1063/1.3466920].

Thermal gap conductance at low contact pressures (<1 MPa): Effect of gold plating and plating thickness

Thermal contact conductance (TCC) measurements are made on bare and gold plated (<= 0.5 mu m) oxygen free high conductivity (OFHC) Cu and brass contacts in vacuum, nitrogen, and argon environments. It is observed that the TCC in gaseous environment is significantly higher than that in vacuum due to the enhanced thermal gap conductance. It is found that for a given contact load and gas pressure, the thermal gap conductance for bare OFHC Cu contacts is higher than that for gold plated contacts. It is due to the difference in the molecular weights of copper and gold, which influences the exchange of kinetic energy between the gas molecules and contact surfaces. Furthermore, the gap conductance is found to increase with increasing thickness of gold plating. Topography measurements and scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis of contact surfaces revealed that surfaces become smoother with increasing gold plating thickness, thus resulting in smaller gaps and consequently higher gap conductance. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Electron field emission from sp (2)-induced insulating to metallic behaviour of amorphous carbon (a-C) films

The influence of concentration and size of sp (2) cluster on the transport properties and electron field emissions of amorphous carbon films have been investigated. The observed insulating to metallic behaviour from reduced activation energy derived from transport measurement and threshold field for electron emission of a-C films can be explained in terms of improvements in the connectivity between sp (2) clusters. The connectivity is resulted by the cluster concentration and size. The concentration and size of sp (2) content cluster is regulated by the coalescence of carbon globules into clusters, which evolves with deposition conditions.

Two-stage photoquenching in semi-insulating GaAs:EL2

The photoquenching of EL2 in semi‐insulating gallium arsenide is seen to be a complex process, where at low temperatures the initial slow quenching is followed by a switch to fast quenching. A possible explanation involving lattice strain mediated cooperative structural relaxation arising out of transition to the metastable state is proposed.

Superconducting gap in Nb seen by point contact spectroscopy

The nonlinear current voltage characteristics of a point contact convey information about various excitations in the metal. We have made a poin~ contact study on a superconductor to see the band gap and on a normal metal to see Ihe transport characteristics.

Electronic Structure of and the Metal-Insulator Transition in La1-xSrxCoO3-δ: A Soft-X-Ray Absorption Study

We report the soft-X-ray absorption spectra at the oxygen K-edge of La1-xSrxCoO3-δ (x = 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4) series with experimentally determined δ values. We show that the doping of holes by replacing La3+ with Sr2+ induces states within the band gap of the insulating undoped compound for small x and these doped states have a very substantial oxygen 2p character. This indicates that the insulating compounds belong to the charge transfer insulator regime. With increasing Sr content, the doped states broaden into a band overlapping the top of the primarily oxygen p-derived band, leading to an insulator-metal transition at x ≥ 0.2.

Mean-field results of the multiple-band extended Hubbard model for the square-planar CuO2 lattice

We obtain metal-insulator phase diagrams at half-filling for the five-band extended Hubbard model of the square-planar CuO2 lattice treated within a Hartree-Fock mean-field approximation, allowing for spiral spin-density waves. We indicate the existence of an insulating phase (covalent insulator) characterized by strong covalency effects, not identified in the earlier Zaanen-Sawatzky-Allen phase diagram. While the insulating phase is always antiferromagnetic, we also obtain an antiferromagnetic metallic phase for a certain range of interaction parameters. Performing a nonperturbative calculation of J(eff), the in-plane antiferromagnetic interaction is presented as a function of the parameters in the model. We also calculate the band gap and magnetic moments at various sites and discuss critically the contrasting interpretation of the electronic structure of high-T(c) materials arising from photoemission and neutron-scattering experiments.