1/f Noise in dye-sensitized solar cells and NIR photon detectors

All electronic devices are plagued with 1/f noise originating from many causes. The most important factors contributing to 1/f noise in a semiconductor is believed to be recombination of carriers and their trapping at defects and impurity sites. Adsorption of moisture and electron acceptor molecules enhances the intensity of 1/f noise. Amazingly, some molecular species that strongly chelate to the semiconductor surface, suppress 1/f noise owing to passivation of the recombination sites. Thus in addition to sensitization, the dye adsorbed on the nanocrystallites plays a key role in mitigation of recombinations. For this reason dye-sensitized heterojunctions could also find application as low noise NIR photon detectors. Experiments conducted with oxide semiconductors (TiO₂, ZnO, SnO₂) indicate that the mode of binding of dyes at specific sites determines the extent to which the recombination and 1/f noise are suppressed. The transport of electrons in a nanocrystalline matrix is diffusive with a diffusion coefficient D depending on the trapping and detrapping processes. Thus passivation of trapping sites by the adsorbed dye is expected to increase the response time which can be expressed as τ  L²/D, where L = thickness of the nanocrystalline film. Measurement techniques and construction of a dye-sensitized NIR photon detector will be discussed.     

On the extension of automorphisms of polynomial rings

Translated fromSibirskii Matematicheskii Zhurnal, Vol. 36, No. 4, pp. 911–916, July–August, 1995.     

Quantum information processing in optical images

Optical images can be used to transport, store and process information in a parallel way. We discuss different results obtained in the domain of ‘quantum imaging’, aiming at exploiting at the same time the quantum properties of optical images and their intrinsic parallelism. We define the notion of standard quantum limit (SQL) in optical resolution, set by the quantum noise of usual coherent light, and show that it can be much lower than the diffraction limit. We also prove that this limit can be circumvented by especially designed nonclassical and multimode light. We present an experiment showing that OPOs oscillating inside an exactly confocal cavity actually produce such transverse multimode nonclassical light. We finally describe another experiment which has surpassed the SQL in the case of beam positioning, both in the 1D and 2D cases.     

Families of Line-Graphs and Their Quantization

Any directed graph G with N vertices and J edges has an associated line-graph L(G) where the J edges form the vertices of L(G). We show that the non-zero eigenvalues of the adjacency matrices are the same for all graphs of such a family L ⁿ (G). We give necessary and sufficient conditions for a line-graph to be quantisable and demonstrate that the spectra of associated quantum propagators follow the predictions of random matrices under very general conditions. Line-graphs may therefore serve as models to study the semiclassical limit (of large matrix size) of a quantum dynamics on graphs with fixed classical behaviour.     

X-ray induced fluorescence spectrometry at grazing incidence for quantitative surface and layer analysis

Summary Single layers and layer systems on diverse substrates were measured by Total Reflection X-Ray Fluorescence (TXRF) spectrometry. The angular dependence of the fluorescence intensities at grazing incidence allows the elemental composition, density and thickness of the layers to be evaluated using model calculations.     

Giant dipole resonance in55Mn* studied with the BGO detector

High-energy gamma-rays emitted in the decay of the giant dipole resonance built on excited states of⁵⁵Mn nucleus were measured with a bismuth germanate detector. Resonance parameters were extracted from the fits to the experimental spectra. Two new high-energy calibration points originating from slow-neutron capture in germanium isotopes of bismuth germanate crystal are proposed for large-volume BGO detectors.     

The influence of temperature gradients on the kinetic boundary layer problem for a condensing droplet

We extend an earlier method for solving kinetic boundary layer problems to the case of particles moving in aspatially inhomogeneous background. The method is developed for a gas mixture containing a supersaturated vapor and a light carrier gas from which a small droplet condenses. The release of heat of condensation causes a temperature difference between droplet and gas in the quasistationary state; the kinetic equation describing the vapor is the stationary Klein-Kramers equation for Brownian particles diffusing in a temperature gradient. By means of an expansion in Burnett functions, this equation is transformed into a set of coupled algebrodifferential equations. By numerical integration we construct fundamental solutions of this equation that are subsequently combined linearly to fulfill appropriate mesoscopic boundary conditions for particles leaving the droplet surface. In view of the intrinsic numerical instability of the system of equations, a novel procedure is developed to remove the admixture of fast growing solutions to the solutions of interest. The procedure is tested for a few model problems and then applied to a slightly simplified condensation problem with parameters corresponding to the condensation of mercury in a background of neon. The effects of thermal gradients and thermodiffusion on the growth rate of the droplet are small (of the order of 1%), but well outside of the margin of error of the method.     

Even denominator filling factors in the thermoelectric power of a 2DEG

We have investigated the interaction of phonons with a 2DEG in the FQH regime with phonon drag thermoelectric power (TEP). We find that the TEP at filling factors with the same even denominator is identical and at other even denominator filling factors they differ only by a constant. Assuming these states to be Composite Fermions (CF), we can explain our observations by extending a zero magnetic field theory for phonon drag to the CF-phonon interaction. This analysis is further corroborated by the observed T⁴ dependence of the CF TEP.