We report on optically induced transport phenomena in freely suspended channels containing a two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG). The submicron devices are fabricated in AlGaAs/GaAs heterostructures by etching techniques. The photoresponse of the devices can be understood in terms of the combination of photogating and a photodoping effect. The hereby enhanced electronic conductance exhibits a time constant in the range of one to ten milliseconds.
Featuring dense spatial distributions of engineered metallic particles, electromagnetic metamaterials exhibit simultaneously negative values of both, dielectric permittivity and magnetic permeability, within a resonance frequency band called left-handed passband. Unusual electromagnetic properties are found resulting in promising applications such as sub-wavelength resolution imaging. State-of-the-art micro/nanomanufacturing has led to resonance frequencies reaching the visible red. The common embedding of the metal particles in plastic matrices or deposition on dielectric substrates within a small area severely limits the usefulness of the materials. Here, we use UV or X-ray lithography to build comparably large areas and quantities of the first freely-suspended matrix-free metamaterials in which the metallic structures are S-string-like with their ends held by a window-frame. In vacuo spectral characterization combined with simulation reveals left-handed passbands from 1.6 to 2.2 THz. Owing to their size, the devices can be easily handled. They offer a straightforward way of making them tunable and two-dimensionally isotropic.
Studying thermal transport at the nanoscale poses formidable experimental challenges due both to the physics of the measurement process and to the issues of accuracy and reproducibility. The laser-induced transient thermal grating (TTG) technique permits non-contact measurements on nanostructured samples without a need for metal heaters or any other extraneous structures, offering the advantage of inherently high absolute accuracy. We present a review of recent studies of thermal transport in nanoscale silicon membranes using the TTG technique. An overview of the methodology, including an analysis of measurements errors, is followed by a discussion of new findings obtained from measurements on both solid and nanopatterned membranes. The most important results have been a direct observation of non-diffusive phonon-mediated transport at room temperature and measurements of thickness-dependent thermal conductivity of suspended membranes across a wide thickness range, showing good agreement with first-principles-based theory assuming diffuse scattering at the boundaries. Measurements on a membrane with a periodic pattern of nanosized holes indicated fully diffusive transport and yielded thermal diffusivity values in agreement with Monte Carlo simulations. Based on the results obtained to-date, we conclude that room-temperature thermal transport in membranebased silicon nanostructures is now reasonably well understood.
In this study, we use the transient thermal grating optical technique textemdash a non-contact, laser-based thermal metrology technique with intrinsically high accuracy textemdash to investigate room-temperature phonon-mediated thermal transport in two nanoporous holey silicon membranes with limiting dimensions of 100 nm and 250 nm respectively. We compare the experimental results to ab initio calculations of phonon-mediated thermal transport according to the phonon Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) using two different computational techniques. We find that the calculations conducted within the Casimir framework, i.e. based on the BTE with the bulk phonon dispersion and diffuse scattering from surfaces, are in quantitative agreement with the experimental data, and thus conclude that this framework is adequate for describing phonon-mediated thermal transport through holey silicon membranes with feature sizes on the order of 100 nm.
It is shown theoretically that circularly polarized irradiation of two-dimensional electron gas can induce the localized electron states which antiferromagnetically interact with conduction electrons, resulting in the Kondo effect. Conditions of experimental observation of the effect are discussed for modern nanostructures.
We report the first temperature dependent phonon transport measurements in suspended Cu-CVD single layer graphene (SLG) from 15K to 380K using microfabricated suspended devices. The thermal conductance per unit cross section $sigma$/A increases with temperature and exhibits a peak near T~280K ($pm$10K) due to the Umklapp process. At low temperatures (T<140K), the temperature dependent thermal conductivity scales as ~T^{1.5}, suggesting that the main contribution to thermal conductance arises from flexural acoustic (ZA) phonons in suspended SLG. The $sigma$/A reaches a high value of 1.7$times10^5 T^{1.5}$ W/m^2K, which is approaching the expected ballistic phonon thermal conductance for two-dimensional graphene sheets. Our results not only clarify the ambiguity in the thermal conductance, but also demonstrate the potential of Cu-CVD graphene for heat related applications.