No Arabic abstract
The design and fabrication of phononic crystals (PnCs) hold the key to control the propagation of heat and sound at the nanoscale. However, there is a lack of experimental studies addressing the impact of order/disorder on the phononic properties of PnCs. Here, we present a comparative investigation of the influence of disorder on the hypersonic and thermal properties of two-dimensional PnCs. PnCs of ordered and disordered lattices are fabricated of circular holes with equal filling fractions in free-standing Si membranes. Ultrafast pump and probe spectroscopy (asynchronous optical sampling) and Raman thermometry based on a novel two-laser approach are used to study the phononic properties in the gigahertz (GHz) and terahertz (THz) regime, respectively. Finite element method simulations of the phonon dispersion relation and three-dimensional displacement fields furthermore enable the unique identification of the different hypersonic vibrations. The increase of surface roughness and the introduction of short-range disorder are shown to modify the phonon dispersion and phonon coherence in the hypersonic (GHz) range without affecting the room-temperature thermal conductivity. On the basis of these findings, we suggest a criteria for predicting phonon coherence as a function of roughness and disorder.
Crack initiation emerges due to a combination of elasticity, plasticity, and disorder, and it is heavily dependent on the materials microstructural details. In this paper, we investigate brittle metals with coarse-grained, microstructural disorder that could originate in a materials manufacturing process, such as alloying. As an investigational tool, we consider crack initiation from a surface, ellipsoidal notch: As the radius of curvature at the notch increases, there is a dynamic transition from notch-induced crack initiation to bulk-disorder crack nucleation. We perform extensive and realistic simulations using a phase-field approach coupled to crystal plasticity. Furthermore, the microstructural disorder and notch width are varied in order to study the transition. We identify this transition for various disorder strengths in terms of the damage evolution. Above the transition, we identify detectable precursors to crack initiation that we quantify in terms of the expected stress drops during mode I fracture loading. We discuss ways to observe and analyze this brittle to quasi-brittle transition in experiments.
Suppression of the critical temperature in homogeneously disordered superconducting films is a consequence of the disorder-induced enhancement of Coulomb repulsion. We demonstrate that for the majority of thin films studied now this effect cannot be completely explained in the assumption of two-dimensional diffusive nature of electrons motion. The main contribution to the $T_c$ suppression arises from the correction to the electron-electron interaction constant coming from small scales of the order of the Fermi wavelength that leads to the critical temperature shift $delta T_c/T_{c0} sim - 1/k_Fl$, where $k_F$ is the Fermi momentum and $l$ is the mean free path. Thus almost for all superconducting films that follow the fermionic scenario of $T_c$ suppression with decreasing the film thickness, this effect is caused by the proximity to the three-dimensional Anderson localization threshold and is controlled by the parameter $k_F l$ rather than the sheet resistance of the film.
We report the observation of a metal-insulator transition in a two-dimensional electron gas in silicon. By applying substrate bias, we have varied the mobility of our samples, and observed the creation of the metallic phase when the mobility was high enough ($mu ~> 1 m^2/Vs$), consistent with the assertion that this transition is driven by electron-electron interactions. In a perpendicular magnetic field, the magnetoconductance is positive in the vicinity of the transition, but negative elsewhere. Our experiment suggests that such behavior results from a decrease of the spin-dependent part of the interaction in the vicinity of the transition.
Dirac semimetals, the materials featured with discrete linearly crossing points (called Dirac points) between four bands, are critical states of topologically distinct phases. Such gapless topological states have been accomplished by a band-inversion mechanism, in which the Dirac points can be annihilated pairwise by perturbations without changing the symmetry of the system. Here, we report an experimental observation of Dirac points that are enforced completely by the crystal symmetry, using a nonsymmorphic three-dimensional phononic crystal. Intriguingly, our Dirac phononic crystal hosts four spiral topological surface states, in which the surface states of opposite helicities intersect gaplessly along certain momentum lines, as confirmed by our further surface measurements. The novel Dirac system may release new opportunities for studying the elusive (pseudo)relativistic physics, and also offer a unique prototype platform for acoustic applications.
The time-dependent fluctuations of conductivity sigma have been studied in a two-dimensional electron system in low-mobility, small-size Si inversion layers. The noise power spectrum is ~1/f^{alpha} with alpha exhibiting a sharp jump at a certain electron density n_s=n_g. An enormous increase in the relative variance of sigma is observed as n_s is reduced below n_g, reflecting a dramatic slowing down of the electron dynamics. This is attributed to the freezing of the electron glass. The data strongly suggest that glassy dynamics persists in the metallic phase.