National Institute Of Materials Physics - Romania

The possibility to intercalate noble gas atoms below epitaxial graphene monolayers coupled with the instability at high temperature of graphene on the surface of certain metals has been exploited to produce Ar-filled graphene nanosized blisters evenly distributed on the bare Ni(111) surface. We have followed in real time the self-assembling of the nanoblisters during the thermal annealing of the Gr/Ni(111) interface loaded with Ar and characterized their morphology and structure at the atomic scale. The nanoblisters contain Ar aggregates compressed at high pressure arranged below the graphene monolayer skin that is decoupled from the Ni substrate and sealed only at the periphery through stable C-Ni bonds. Their in-plane truncated triangular shapes are driven by the crystallographic directions of the Ni surface. The nonuniform strain revealed along the blister profile is explained by the inhomogeneous expansion of the flexible graphene lattice that adjusts to envelop the Ar atom stacks.

The Peierls transition of polycrystalline CuGeO3 samples was investigated by thermal and magnetic investigations. We find that spin disorder induced by chain breaking and grain boundaries has similar effects to doping but without suppressing the spin-Peierls transition temperature or the spin-Peierls gap.

Aluminum doped zinc oxide (AZO) thin films were obtained by pulsed laser deposition on (001) SrTiO3 (STO) on a range of substrate temperatures during ablation between 300 degrees C and 600 degrees C. A hexagonal system lying on a cubic one should be difficult to be obtained in epitaxial form. The geometrical selection of the AZO growth on (001) STO is not giving a unique preferential orientation. Two orientations, c-axis (along [001]) and 110, have been observed experimentally with different ratios at different substrate temperature. Discussions are made with respect to the temperature dependence of lattice mismatch between the two cases and the cubic surface of the substrate, and to the substrate surface morphology and terminating atomic layer composition. The 110 AZO is the main phase at deposition temperature of 550 degrees C, while for other substrate temperatures the 001 is the preferential orientation. The conductive character of 110 AZO thin film have been inferred from both ellipsometry spectra and current-voltage measurements. Excepting the samples deposited at 300 degrees C, the lowest resistivity is recorded for the samples with 110 AZO as the main phase. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Aluminophosphate glasses from the Li2O-BaO-Al2O3-P2O5 system with the addition of nonmagnetic and paramagnetic rare earth ions, were prepared using a wet nonconventional method to process the raw materials, followed by a melting-quenching procedure. The glasses obtained were characterized with respect to their magnetic and magneto-optical properties using superconducting quantum interference device magnetometry and spectroscopic ellipsometry. The assumption of a linear dependence of the Verdet constant on the magnetic susceptibility, with a proportionality constant dependent on the type of vitreous matrix and doping ion, is critically discussed. The diamagnetic and paramagnetic contributions to the Faraday rotation were separately analyzed and specific designs for optimal active and passive elements are proposed.

This work reports on the unprecedented magnetron sputtering deposition of submicrometric hollow cones of bioactive glass at low temperature in the absence of any template or catalyst. The influence of sputtering conditions on the formation and development of bioglass cones was studied. It was shown that larger populations of well-developed cones could be achieved by increasing the argon sputtering pressure. A mechanism describing the growth of bioglass hollow cones is presented, offering the links for process control and reproducibility of the cone features. The composition, structure, and morphology of the as-synthesized hollow cones were investigated by energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS), Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), grazing incidence geometry X-ray diffraction (GIXRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM)-selected area electron diffraction (SAED). The in vitro biological performance, assessed by degradation tests (ISO 10993-14) and cytocompatibility assays (ISO 10993-5) in endothelial cell cultures, was excellent. This allied with resorbability and the unique morphological features make the submicrometer hollow cones interesting candidate material devices for focal transitory permeabilization of the blood brain barrier in the treatment of carcinoma and neurodegenerative disorders.

A series of flexibly linked bis(pyridinium) salts with various counterions (Br-, PF6-, BF4- and OTf-) was designed and prepared starting from corresponding N-alkylated 4-pyridones precursors with mesogenic 3,4,5-tris(alkyloxy)benzyl moieties (alkyl=dodecyl or tetradecyl). These salts were investigated for their liquid crystalline properties by a combination of differential scanning calorimetry, polarising optical microscopy and temperature-dependent powder X-ray diffraction (XRD). Their thermal stability was checked by thermogravimetric analysis. All bis(pyridinium) salts, except the triflate salt with shorter terminal carbon chain, display an enantiotropic liquid crystalline behaviour with a hexagonal columnar (Col(h)) phase assigned on the basis of its characteristic texture and XRD studies. It was found that these luminescent bis(pyridinium) salts show weak emission in dichloromethane solutions at room temperature and a pronounced red-shifted emission in solid state. The emission properties of these bis(pyridinium) salts do not depend significantly on the nature of counterion employed.

Gallium antimonide (GaSb) is the basis of the most photovoltaic and thermophotovoltaic (TPV) systems and its innovative technological aspects based on modern ultra-high vacuum techniques are in trend for device achievement. The real surface of GaSb is modified by technological processes that can conduce to problems related to the reproducible control of its surface properties. The GaSb surface is reactive in atmosphere due to oxygen presence and exhibits a native oxide layer. The evolution of native oxides during the ion sputtering, chemical etching and thermal annealing processes for preparing the surface is presented in detailed way. Ratios of surface constituents are obtained by Angle Resolved X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (ARXPS). Moreover, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM), Energy Dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy (EDS), Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) and Low-Energy Electron Diffraction (LEED) are used for characterization. The surface stoichiometry is changed using a specific etchant (e.g. citric acid) at different etching time and is analyzed by ARXPS, SEM, EDS and AFM methods. The experimental results provide useful information regarding surface native oxides characteristics on n-GaSb(100) to be taken into account for development of low resistance contacts for TPV devices based on GaSb alloy. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

A model for current voltage characteristics of a thin film metal-ferroelectric-metal structure is constructed by combining the electrostatics of a polarized ferroelectric film with the balanced flow of charge through its interfaces. Using a set of fitting parameters, good agreement with several sets of experimental data is obtained for different system temperatures. The influence of model parameters on the current-voltage characteristic is discussed. Best fit values of some of these parameters correlate well with ab initio calculations in the literature, supporting the idea of low dielectric permittivity of the interface transition layers in the ferroelectric.

We report in this paper on the deposition and characterization of CeO2 nanostructured thin films with hierarchical morphology. Micro -sized ceria powder (CeO2, 99.9% purity) was pressed to obtain a ceramic target. An ArF laser working at 193 nm irradiated the target in controlled oxygen gas flow at constant pressure (0.1 mbar). Silicon wafers used as substrates for thin films were heated at different temperatures, up to 773 K. The influence of substrate temperature on the structure and surface morphology of ceria thin films was studied by X-ray diffraction (XRD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), Raman spectroscopy and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The refractive indices and information about roughness and thickness were revealed by spectroellipsometry. Crystalline cubic ceria thin films exhibiting a hierarchical structure that combines columnar and dendritic growth were obtained at temperatures above 473 K. For the samples obtained at 773 K, columns ending in pyramidal formations with sharp edges and sizes of hundreds of nanometers were observed, indicating a high crystallinity of the layer. XRD analysis reveals a consistent increase of the X-ray coherence length/crystallite size along the [111] direction with increasing temperature. Using a semi -empirical formula, Raman crystallites sizes were calculated and it was found that size increases with the temperature increasing. The spectroellipsometry investigations evidenced the increasing of refractive index with the substrate temperature increase. High surface roughness and pyramidal structures were noticed from the atomic force microscopy images for layers deposited at substrate temperature above 473 K. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

The influence of the transient thermal effects on the partition of the energy of selfrecoils in germanium and silicon into energy eventually given to electrons and to atomic recoils respectively is studied. The transient effects are treated in the frame of the thermal spike model, which considers the electronic and atomic subsystems coupled through the electron-phonon interaction. For low energies of selfrecoils, we show that the corrections to the energy partition curves due to the energy exchange during the transient processes modify the Lindhard predictions. These effects depend on the initial temperature of the target material, as the energies exchanged between electronic and lattice subsystems have different signs for temperatures lower and higher than about 15 K. Many of the experimental data reported in the literature support the model. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.