No Arabic abstract
We report on the synthesis of highly oriented a-axis CrO2 films onto (0001) sapphire by atmospheric pressure CVD from CrO3 precursor, at growth temperatures down to 330 degree Celsius, i.e. close to 70 degrees lower than in published data for the same chemical system. The films keep the high quality magnetic behaviour as those deposited at higher temperature, which can be looked as a promising result in view of their use with thermally sensitive materials, e.g. narrow band gap semiconductors.
This work reports on the synthesis of CrO2 thin films by atmospheric pressure CVD using chromium trioxide (CrO3) and oxygen. Highly oriented (100) CrO2 films containing highly oriented (0001) Cr2O3 were grown onto Al2O3(0001) substrates. Films display a sharp magnetic transition at 375 K and a saturation magnetization of 1.92 Bohr magnetons per f.u., close to the bulk value of 2 Bohr magnetons per f.u. for the CrO2. Keywords: Chromium dioxide (CrO2), Atmospheric pressure CVD, Spintronics.
We report magnetotransport measurements on high purity sintered samples of spintronic CrO2 in an unexplored crystallographic regime between 5-300 K. The negative magnetoresistance (MR) as derived from RH isotherms is observed to be unhysteretic up to temperatures as high as 200 K. Between 240-290 K, RH isotherms exhibit some unusual features including a positive MR and strong pinning effects. These feature disappear above 290 K and is apparently related with the antiferromagnetic ordering of the insulating grain boundary. Qualitatively similar features with significantly enhanced MR are also observed when the GB density is increased. These results bring out the role played by the magnetic and crystallographic microstructure on the magnitude, sign and hysteresis of the magnetoresistance in this technologically important material.
Germanium is emerging as the substrate of choice for the growth of graphene in CMOS-compatible processes. For future application in next generation devices the accurate control over the properties of high-quality graphene synthesized on Ge surfaces, such as number of layers and domain size, is of paramount importance. Here we investigate the role of the process gas flows on the CVD growth of graphene on Ge(100). The quality and morphology of the deposited material is assessed by using microRaman spectroscopy, x-ray photoemission spectroscopy, scanning electron and atomic force microscopies. We find that by simply varying the carbon precursor flow different growth regimes - yielding to graphene nanoribbons, graphene monolayer and graphene multilayer - are established. We identify the growth conditions yielding to a layer-by-layer growth regime and report on the achievement of homogeneous monolayer graphene with an average intensity ratio of 2D and G bands in the Raman map larger than 3.
Chemisorbed molecules at a fuel cell electrode are a very sensitive probe of the surrounding electrochemical environment, and one that can be accurately monitored with different spectroscopic techniques. We develop a comprehensive electrochemical model to study molecular chemisorption at either constant charge or fixed applied voltage, and calculate from first principles the voltage dependence of vibrational frequencies -- the vibrational Stark effect -- for CO adsorbed on close-packed platinum electrodes. The predicted vibrational Stark slopes are found to be in very good agreement with experimental electrochemical spectroscopy data, thereby resolving previous controversies in the quantitative interpretation of in-situ experiments and elucidating the relation between canonical and grand-canonicaldescriptions of vibrational surface phenomena.
We report on the structural, electrical and magnetic properties of ZnCoO thin films grown by Atomic Layer Deposition (ALD) method using reactive organic precursors of zinc and cobalt. As a zinc precursor we applied either dimethylzinc or diethylzinc and cobalt (II) acetyloacetonate as a cobalt precursor. The use of these precursors allowed us the significant reduction of a growth temperature to 300oC and below, which proved to be very important for the growth of uniform films of ZnCoO. Structural, electrical and magnetic properties of the obtained ZnCoO layers will be discussed based on the results of SIMS, SEM, EDS, XRD, AFM, Hall effect and SQUID investigations.