No Arabic abstract
Aspects of the preparation process and performance degradation are two major problems of photocathodes. The lack of a means for dynamic quantum efficiency measurements results in the inability to observe the inhomogeneity of the cathode surface by fine structural analysis and in real time.Here we present a simple and scalable technique for in situ real-time quantum efficiency diagnosis. An incoherent light source provides uniform illumination on the cathode surface, and solenoid magnets are used as lens for focusing and imaging the emitted electron beam on a downstream scintillator screen, which converts the quantum efficiency information into fluorescence intensity distribution. The microscopic discontinuity and the dynamic changes of the quantum efficiency of a gallium arsenide photocathode are observed at a resolution of a few microns. An unexpected uneven decrease of the quantum efficiency is also recorded. The work demonstrates a new observation method for photoemission materials research.
We report quantum efficiency (QE) enhancements in accelerator technology relevant antimonide photocathodes (K2CsSb) by interfacing them with atomically thin two-dimensional (2D) crystal layers. The enhancement occurs in a reflection mode, when a 2D crystal is placed in between the photocathodes and optically reflective substrates. Specifically, the peak QE at 405 nm (3.1 eV) increases by a relative 10 percent, while the long wavelength response at 633 nm (2.0 eV) increases by a relative 36 percent on average and up to 80 percent at localized hot spot regions when photocathodes are deposited onto graphene coated stainless steel. There is a similar effect for photocathodes deposited on hexagonal boron nitride monolayer coatings using nickel substrates. The enhancement does not occur when reflective substrates are replaced with optically transparent sapphire. Optical transmission, X-ray diffraction (XRD) and X-ray fluorescence (XRF) revealed that thickness, crystal orientation, quality and elemental stoichiometry of photocathodes do not appreciably change due to 2D crystal coatings. These results suggest optical interactions are responsible for the QE enhancements when 2D crystal sublayers are present on reflective substrates, and provide a pathway toward a simple method of QE enhancement in semiconductor photocathodes by an atomically thin 2D crystal on substrates.
Two generations of a novel detector for high-resolution transmission imaging and spectrometry of fast-neutrons are presented. These devices are based on a hydrogenous fiber scintillator screen and single- or multiple-gated intensified camera systems (ICCD). This detector is designed for energy-selective neutron radiography with nanosecond-pulsed broad-energy (1 - 10 MeV) neutron beams. Utilizing the Time-of-Flight (TOF) method, such a detector is capable of simultaneously capturing several images, each at a different neutron energy (TOF). In addition, a gamma-ray image can also be simultaneously registered, allowing combined neutron/gamma inspection of objects. This permits combining the sensitivity of the fast-neutron resonance method to low-Z elements with that of gamma radiography to high-Z materials.
We introduce a real-time, high-resolution background replacement technique which operates at 30fps in 4K resolution, and 60fps for HD on a modern GPU. Our technique is based on background matting, where an additional frame of the background is captured and used in recovering the alpha matte and the foreground layer. The main challenge is to compute a high-quality alpha matte, preserving strand-level hair details, while processing high-resolution images in real-time. To achieve this goal, we employ two neural networks; a base network computes a low-resolution result which is refined by a second network operating at high-resolution on selective patches. We introduce two largescale video and image matting datasets: VideoMatte240K and PhotoMatte13K/85. Our approach yields higher quality results compared to the previous state-of-the-art in background matting, while simultaneously yielding a dramatic boost in both speed and resolution.
Strain engineering is the art of inducing controlled lattice distortions in a material to modify specific physicochemical properties. Strain engineering is applied for basic fundamental studies of physics and chemistry of solids but also for device fabrication through the development of materials with new functionalities. Thin films are one of the most important tools for strain engineering. Thin films can in fact develop large strain due to the crystalline constrains at the interface with the substrate and/or as the result of specific morphological features that can be selected by an appropriate tuning of the deposition parameters. Within this context, the in situ measurement of the substrate curvature is a powerful diagnostic tool allowing a real time monitoring of the stress state of the growing film. This manuscript reviews a few recent applications of this technique and presents new measurements that point out the great potentials of the substrate curvature measurement in strain engineering. Our study also shows how, due to the high sensitivity of the technique, the correct interpretation of the results can be in certain cases not trivial and require complementary characterizations and an accurate knowledge of the physicochemical properties of the materials under investigation.
Aluminum-germanium nanowires (NWs) thermal activated solid state reaction is a promising system as very sharp and well defined one dimensional contacts can be created between a metal and a semiconductor, that can become a quantum dot if the size becomes sufficiently small. In the search for high performance devices without variability, it is of high interest to allow deterministic fabrication of nanowire quantum dots, avoiding sample variability and obtaining atomic scale precision on the fabricated dot size. In this paper, we present a reliable fabrication process to produce sub-10 nm Ge quantum dots (QDs), using a combination of ex-situ thermal annealing via rapid thermal annealing (RTA) and in-situ Joule heating technique in a transmission electron microscope (TEM). First we present in-situ direct joule heating experiments showing how the heating electrode could be damaged due to the formation of Al crystals and voids at the vicinity of the metal/NW contact, likely related with electro-migration phenomena. We show that the contact quality can be preserved by including an additional ex-situ RTA step prior to the in-situ heating. The in-situ observations also show in real-time how the exchange reaction initiates simultaneously from several locations underneath the Al contact pad, and the Al crystal grows gradually inside the initial Ge NW with the growth interface along a Ge(111) lattice plane. Once the reaction front moves out from underneath the contact metal, two factors jeopardize an atomically accurate control of the Al/Ge reaction interface. We observed a local acceleration of the reaction interface due to the electron beam irradiation in the transmission electron microscope as well as the appearance of large jumps of the interface in unpassivated Ge wires while a smooth advancement of the reaction interface was observed in wires with an Al2O3 protecting shell on the surface. Carefully controlling all aspects of the exchange reaction, we demonstrate a fabrication process combining ex-situ and in-situ heating techniques to precisely control and produce axial Al/Ge/Al NW heterostructures with an ultra-short Ge segment down to 8 nanometers. Practically, the scaling down of Ge segment length is only limited by the microscope resolution.