No Arabic abstract
Amorphous molybdenum silicide compounds have attracted significant interest for potential device applications, particularly in single-photon detector. In this work, the temperature-dependent resistance and magneto-resistance behaviors were measured to reveal the charge transport mechanism, which is of great importance for applications but is still insufficient. It is found that Mott variable hopping conductivity dominates the transport of sputtered amorphous molybdenum silicide thin films. Additionally, the observed magneto-resistance crossover from negative to positive is ascribed to the interference enhancement and the shrinkage of electron wave function, both of which vary the probability of hopping between localized sites.
We systematically investigated the physical properties of amorphous Mo$_{rm x}$Si$_{1-x}$ films deposited by the magnetron co-sputtering technique. The critical temperature $T_C$ of Mo$_{rm x}$ Si$_{1-x}$ films increases gradually with the stoichiometry x, and the highest $T_C$=7.9 K was found in Mo$_{rm 0.83}$ Si$_{0.17}$. Beyond $x$=0.83, preformed Cooper pairs and superconducting domains persist in the films, despite the superconducting state with perfect zero-resistivity is absent. The thick films of Mo$_{rm 0.83}$ Si$_{0.17}$ show surprising degradation in which the onset of zero-resistivity is suppressed below 2 K. The thin Mo$_{rm 0.83}$ Si$_{0.17}$ films, however, reveal robust superconductivity even with thickness d$leq$1 nm. We also characterized wide microwires based on the 2 nm thin Mo$_{rm 0.8}$ Si$_{0.2}$ films with widths 40 and 60 $mu$m, which show single-photon sensitivity at 780 nm and 1550 nm wavelength
In this work, amorphous thin films in Mg-Si-O-N system were prepared in order to investigate the dependence of optical and mechanical properties on Mg composition. Reactive RF magnetron co-sputtering from magnesium and silicon targets were used for the deposition of Mg-Si-O-N thin films. Films were deposited on float glass, silica wafers and sapphire substrates in an Ar, N2 and O2 gas mixture. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, atomic force microscopy, scanning electron microscopy, spectroscopic ellipsometry, and nanoindentation were employed to characterize the composition, surface morphology, and properties of the films.
We investigated the structural and magnetic properties of bare SrRuO$_3$ (SRO) ultra-thin films and SrRuO$_3$/SrIrO$_3$/SrZrO$_3$ (SRO/SIO/SZO: RIZ) trilayer heterostructures between 10 K and 80 K, by comparing macroscopic data using magneto-optical Kerr effect (MOKE) and magneto-transport (anomalous Hall effect: AHE), with nanoscale fingerprints when applying non-contact scanning force microscopy (nc-SFM) and magnetic force microscopy (MFM). SRO and RIZ ultra-thin films were epitaxially grown at 650C onto vicinal SrTiO$_3$ (100) single-crystalline substrates to a nominal thickness of 4 and 4/2/2 unit cells (uc), respectively. Our correlated analysis allows associating topographic sample features of overgrown individual layers to their residual magnetization, as is shown here to be relevant for interpreting the macroscopic AHE data. Although the hump-like features in the AHE suggest a magnetically extured skyrmion phase to exist around 55 K associated to the topological Hall effect (THE), both our MOKE and MFM data cannot support this theory. In contrast, our SFM/MFM local-scale analysis finds the local coercive field to be strongly dependent on the effective layer thickness and stoichiometry in both the SRO and RIZ samples, with huge impact on the local band-structure. In fact, it is these variations that in turn mimic a potential THE through anomalies in the AHE resistivity loops.
We apply the Lifshitz theory of dispersion forces to find a contribution to the free energy of peptide films which is caused by the zero-point and thermal fluctuations of the electromagnetic field. For this purpose, using available information about the imaginary parts of dielectric permittivity of peptides, the analytic representation for permittivity of typical peptide along the imaginary frequency axis is devised. Numerical computations of the fluctuation-induced free energy are performed at room temperature for the freestanding peptide films, containing different fractions of water, and for similar films deposited on dielectric (SiO$_2$) and metal (Au) substrates. It is shown that the free energy of a freestanding peptide film is negative and, thus, contributes to its stability. The magnitude of the free energy increases with increasing fraction of water and decreases with increasing thickness of a film. For peptide films deposited on a dielectric substrate the free energy is nonmonotonous. It is negative for thicker than 100 nm films, reaches the maximum value at some film thickness, but vanishes and changes its sign for thinner than 100 nm films. The fluctuation-induced free energy of peptide films deposited on metallic substrate is found to be positive which makes films less stable. In all three cases, simple analytic expressions for the free energy of sufficiently thick films are found. The obtained results may be useful to attain film stability in the next generation of organic microdevices with further shrinked dimensions.
Vanadium dioxide is a complex oxide material, which shows large resistivity and optical reflectance change while transitioning from the insulator to metal phase at ~68 {deg}C. In this work, we use a modified atmospheric thermal oxidation method to oxidize RF-sputtered Vanadium films. Structural, surface-morphology and phase-transition properties of the oxidized films as a function of oxidation duration are presented. Phase-pure VO2 films are obtained by oxidizing ~130 nm Vanadium films in short oxidation duration of ~30 seconds. Compared to previous reports on VO2 synthesis using atmospheric oxidation of Vanadium films of similar thickness, we obtain a reduction in oxidation duration by more than one order. Synthesized VO2 thin film shows resistance switching of ~3 orders of magnitude. We demonstrate optical reflectance switching in long-wave infrared wavelengths in VO2 films synthesized using atmospheric oxidation of Vanadium. The extracted refractive index of VO2 in the insulating and in the metallic phase is in good agreement with VO2 synthesized using other methods. The considerable reduction in oxidation time of VO2 synthesis while retaining good resistance and optical switching properties will help in integration of VO2 in limited thermal budget processes, enabling further applications of this phase-transition material.