No Arabic abstract
Thermal resistances from interfaces impede heat dissipation in micro/nanoscale electronics, especially for high-power electronics. Despite the growing importance of understanding interfacial thermal transport, advanced thermal characterization techniques which can visualize thermal conductance across buried interfaces, especially for nonmetal-nonmetal interfaces, are still under development. This work reports a dual-modulation-frequency TDTR mapping technique to visualize the thermal conduction across buried semiconductor interfaces for beta-Ga2O3-SiC samples. Both the beta-Ga2O3 thermal conductivity and the buried beta-Ga2O3-SiC thermal boundary conductance (TBC) are visualized for an area of 200 um x 200 um. Areas with low TBC values ( smaller than 20 MW/m2-K) are successfully identified on the TBC map, which correspond to weakly bonded interfaces caused by high-temperature annealing. The steady-state temperature rise (detector voltage), usually ignored in TDTR measurements, is found to be able to probe TBC variations of the buried interfaces without the limit of thermal penetration depth. This technique can be applied to detect defects/voids in deeply buried heterogeneous interfaces non-destructively, and also opens a door for the visualization of thermal conductance in nanoscale nonhomogeneous structures.
Silicon carbide silicon carbide (SiC SiC) composites are often used in oxidizing environments at high temperatures. Measurements of the thermal conductance of the oxide layer provide a way to better understand the oxidation process with high spatial resolution. We use time domain thermoreflectance (TDTR) to map the thermal conductance of the oxide layer and the thermal conductivity of the SiC SiC composite with a spatial resolution of 3 {mu}m. Heterodyne detection using a 50 kHz modulated probe beam and a 10 MHz modulated pump suppresses the coherent pick-up and enables faster data acquisition than what has previously been possible using sequential demodulation. By analyzing the noise of the measured signals, we find that in the limit of small integration time constants or low laser powers, the dominant source of noise is the input noise of the preamplifier. The thermal conductance of the oxide that forms on the fiber region is lower than the oxide on the matrix due to small differences in thickness and thermal conductivity.
Transient response of the spin Peltier effect (SPE) in a Pt/yttrium iron garnet junction system has been investigated by means of a lock-in thermoreflectance method. We applied an alternating charge current to the Pt layer to drive SPE through the spin Hall effect, and measured the AC response of the resultant SPE-induced temperature modulation at frequencies ranging from 10 Hz to 1 MHz. We found that the SPE-induced temperature modulation decreases with increasing the frequency when the frequency is >1 kHz. This is a characteristic feature of SPE revealed by the high frequency measurements based on the lock-in thermoreflectance, while previous low frequency measurements showed that the SPE signal is independent of the frequency. We attribute the decrease of the temperature modulation to the length scale of the SPE-induced heat current; by comparing the experimental results with one-dimensional heat conduction calculations, the length scale of SPE is estimated to be 0.94 {mu}m.
Angle-resolved photoelectron spectroscopy (ARPES) is the main experimental tool to explore electronic structure of solids resolved in the electron momentum k . Soft-X-ray ARPES (SX-ARPES), operating in a photon energy range around 1 keV, benefits from enhanced probing depth compared to the conventional VUV-range ARPES, and elemental/chemical state specificity achieved with resonant photoemission. These advantages make SX-ARPES ideally suited for buried heterostructure and impurity systems, which are at the heart of current and future electronics. These applications are illustrated here with a few pioneering results, including buried quantum-well states in semiconductor and oxide heterostructures, their bosonic coupling critically affecting electron transport, magnetic impurities in diluted magnetic semiconductors and topological materials, etc. High photon flux and detection efficiency are crucial for pushing the SX-ARPES experiment to these most photon-hungry cases.
Atomic precision advanced manufacturing (APAM) offers creation of donor devices in an atomically thin layer doped beyond the solid solubility limit, enabling unique device physics. This presents an opportunity to use APAM as a pathfinding platform to investigate digital electronics at the atomic limit. Scaling to smaller transistors is increasingly difficult and expensive, necessitating the investigation of alternative fabrication paths that extend to the atomic scale. APAM donor devices can be created using a scanning tunneling microscope (STM). However, these devices are not currently compatible with industry standard fabrication processes. There exists a tradeoff between low thermal budget (LT) processes to limit dopant diffusion and high thermal budget (HT) processes to grow defect-free layers of epitaxial Si and gate oxide. To this end, we have developed an LT epitaxial Si cap and LT deposited Al2O3 gate oxide integrated with an atomically precise single-electron transistor (SET) that we use as an electrometer to characterize the quality of the gate stack. The surface-gated SET exhibits the expected Coulomb blockade behavior. However, the leverage of the gate over the SET is limited by defects in the layers above the SET, including interfaces between the Si and oxide, and structural and chemical defects in the Si cap. We propose a more sophisticated gate stack and process flow that is predicted to improve performance in future atomic precision devices.
We have measured photoemission spectra of SrTiO3/LaTiO3 superlattices with a topmost SrTiO3 layer of variable thickness. Finite coherent spectral weight with a clear Fermi cut-off was observed at chemically abrupt SrTiO3/LaTiO3 interfaces, indicating that an ``electronic reconstruction occurs at the interface between the Mott insulator LaTiO3 and the band insulator SrTiO3. For SrTiO3/LaTiO3 interfaces annealed at high temperatures (~ 1000 C), which leads to Sr/La atomic interdiffusion and hence to the formation of La1-xSrxTiO3-like material, the intensity of the incoherent part was found to be dramatically reduced whereas the coherent part with a sharp Fermi cut-off is enhanced due to the spread of charge. These important experimental features are well reproduced by layer dynamical-mean-field-theory calculation.