Structural, electronic and dielectric properties of high-quality ultrathin BaTiO3 films are investigated. The films, which are grown by ozone-assisted molecular beam epitaxy on Nb-doped SrTiO3 (001) substrates and having thicknesses as thin 8 unit ce
lls (3.2 nm), are unreconstructed and atomically smooth with large crystalline terraces. A strain-driven transition to 3D island formation is observed for films of of 13 unit cells thickness (5.2 nm). The high structural quality of the surfaces, together with the dielectric properties similar to bulk BaTiO3 and dominantly TiO2 surface termination, make these films suitable templates for the synthesis of high-quality metal-oxide multiferroic heterostructures for the fundamental study and exploitation of magneto-electric effects, such as a recently proposed interface effect in Fe/BaTiO3 heterostructures based on Fe-Ti interface bonds.
Using a classical master equation that describes energy transfer over a given lattice, we explore how energy transfer efficiency along with the photon capturing ability depends on network connectivity, on transfer rates, and on volume fractions - the
numbers and relative ratio of fluorescence chromophore components, e.g., donor (D), acceptor (A), and bridge (B) chromophores. For a one-dimensional AD array, the exact analytical expression for efficiency shows a steep increase with a D-to-A transfer rate when a spontaneous decay is sufficiently slow. This result implies that the introduction of B chromophores can be a useful method for improving efficiency for a two-component AD system with inefficient D-to-A transfer and slow spontaneous decay. Analysis of this one-dimensional system can be extended to higher-dimensional systems with chromophores arranged in structures such as a helical or stacked-disk rod, which models the self-assembling monomers of the tobacco mosaic virus coat protein. For the stacked-disk rod, we observe the following: (1) With spacings between sites fixed, a staggered conformation is more efficient than an eclipsed conformation. (2) For a given ratio of A and D chromophores, the uniform distribution of acceptors that minimizes the mean first passage time to acceptors is a key point to designing the optimal network for a donor-acceptor system with a relatively small D-to-A transfer rate. (3) For a three-component ABD system with a large B-to-A transfer rate, a key design strategy is to increase the number of the pathways in accordance with the directional energy flow from D to B to A chromophores.
