Temperature dependence of aluminum nitride reflectance spectra in vacuum ultraviolet region

Temperature dependence of optical reflectance spectra in vacuum ultraviolet region for aluminum nitride has been measured on high-quality single crystal with synchrotron radiation. The dominant structure due to the interband transition is observed at photon energy around 7.7 eV. With decreasing temperature, the energy position of the dominant structure in the reflectance spectra shifts towards higher energy. The experimental data has been fitted to the Bose-Einstein expression and the obtained parameter related to the strength of the electron-phonon interactions is much smaller than that for the peak at 6.2 eV, suggesting that the higher-lying interband transition energy decreases more slowly with increasing temperature in aluminum nitride (AlN).     

Sulfur Concentration in Nanoporous Alumina Membrane

Nanoporous alumina membrane prepared by anodic oxidation using sulfuric acid electrolyte was subjected to TG-DTA and X-ray Photoelectron Spectroscopy (XPS or ESCA) to further study the distribution of sulfur. In XPS study, Ar⁺ ion bombardment was performed on the sample to etch the surface at a rate of 3 nm min^-1. As a result, sulfur was found to be concentrated within a depth of 3nm from the surface. The S content of the surface was found to be 2.7±0.5 wt%, and that at a depth of ca. 3 nm and ca. 10 nm was found to be as low as about 0.6±0.11 wt% (5.37±1.0 wt%→ 1.26±0.2wt% SO₂). In TG-DTA, the mass loss of 7.3% was in fair agreement with that calculated on XPS results (7.1±1.2%). This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Enhanced electron–ion recombination in ion storage rings

We review recent advances in the understanding of the enhanced electron–ion recombination observed in storage ring experiments. The measured recombination rates show a strong enhancement relative to what the standard radiative recombination rates predict. A transient motional electric field is induced in the merging region of an electron and an ion beam in the electron cooler. This induced field opens an additional pathway for free-bound transitions of electrons. The formed Rydberg states can be radiatively stabilized and contribute to the measured rate. We show that this “field induced recombination” (FIR) explains the gap previously observed between measurements and the standard radiative recombination rate.     

Strain analysis of Si by FEM and energy-filtering CBED.

Lattice strains around a platelet oxygen precipitate in Si wafer is studied by energy filtering convergent-beam electron diffraction (CBED) and calculations based on the finite element method (FEM). Local lattice strains are measured from CBD patterns obtained with a probe size less than 2 nm in a specimen thicker than 450 nm. Strains measured are compressive along a direction normal to a plate of the precipitation and tensile along a direction parallel to the plate. Two-dimensional stress fields near the precipitate are obtained with FEM computer analyses by fitting the measured strains. It appears that shear stresses are concentrated at the end of the precipitate edge and the maximum shear stress at an interface between the precipitate and the Si-matrix is 1.9 GPa. It is demonstrated that a combination of the energy filtering CBED and FEM is very useful for the study of local strains near interfaces in semiconductor devices, in particular for the study of stress fields that are too steep for application of the conventional CBED technique.     

Evaluation of compatibility in polymer blend systems by simultaneous DSC-FTIR measurement

The concept of crystallization dynamics method evaluating the miscibility of binary blend system including crystalline component was proposed. Three characteristic rates, nucleation, crystal growth rates (N*, G*) and growth rate of conformation (G _c*) were used to evaluate the miscibility of PVDF/at-PMMA and PVDF/iso-PMMA by the simultaneous DSC-FTIR. N*, G* and G _c* depended remarkably on both temperature and blend fraction (ϕ_PMMA) for PVDF/at-PMMA system, which indicated the miscible system. PVDF/iso-PMMA showed small ϕ_PMMA dependency of N*, G* and G _c*, was estimated the immiscible system. The ΔT/T _m⁰ values, corresponding to Gibbs energy required to attend the constant G* and G _c*, evaluated from G* and G _c* showed the good linear relationships with different slope. The experimental results suggested that the concentration fluctuation existed in PVDF/iso-PMMA system.     

Preparation and certification of the new reference materials; plastics (disk form, JSAC 0621-0625) for determination of mercury using x-ray fluorescent analysis.

The Japan Society for Analytical Chemistry has developed some new plastic certified reference materials (CRMs) for the analysis of mercury in polyester disks using XRF analysis. These CRMs (named as JSAC 0621-0625) were prepared by casting polyesters including a toluene solution of organometallic compounds as a standard. Concentrations of the five levels of mercury ranged from 0 to 250 mg/kg. Homogeneity tests of prepared disks had shown excellent results. Interlaboratory comparison study for the certification was performed by 15 laboratory participants. The z-scores in robust statistical method was applied for the evaluation of outliers. The certified values were assigned after discarding outliers. The uncertainties of certified values were determined as the confidence levels of 95%.     

QCD perturbation theory in the temporal gauge

In this paper we present a non-trivial check of the consistency of the quantization of a gauge theory with fermions (QCD) in the temporal gauge. We use the approach based on the finite time Feynman propagation kernel, in which the Gauss law is imposed as a constraint on the states by means of a functional integration over all the time independent gauge transformations acting on the boundary values of the fields. We spell out in detail the “Feynman rules” when fermions are present and we compute, as an example, the gauge invariant correlation function $$\begin{gathered} G(t) = \left\langle {\bar \psi (0,t)(\gamma _5 \gamma _0 )\frac{{1 - \gamma _0 }}{2}P} \right. \hfill \\ \left. { \cdot \exp \left( {ig\int\limits_0^t {A_0 (0,t')dt'} } \right)(\gamma _5 \gamma _0 )^ + (0,0)} \right\rangle \hfill \\ \end{gathered} $$ up to orderg ², obtaining the expected result.