The origin of epitaxial relationships between different ordered phases of diblock copolymers is studied by examining the nucleation barrier of an arbitrarily oriented nucleus. It is found that the orientation-dependence of the nucleation barrier exhibits a very corrugated landscape with a few deep minima, corresponding to preferred crystallographic orientations of the nuclei. These minima are i...

Nucleation and growth of wurtzite AlN layers on nominal and off-axis Si(0 0 1) substrates by plasma-assisted molecular beam epitaxy is reported. The nucleation and the growth dynamics have been studied in situ by reflection high-energy electron diffraction. For the films grown on the nominal Si(0 0 1) surface, cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy and X-ray diffraction investigations...

In this paper, we review the preparation technology, integration in measurement systems and tests of high-Tc superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs) intended for biomagnetic applications. A focus is on developments specific to Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH, Chalmers University of Technology, MedTech West, and the University of Gothenburg, while placing these results in the perspec...

Controllable interfacial strain can manipulate the physical properties of epitaxial films and help understand the physical nature of the correlation between the properties and the atomic microstructures. By using a proper design of vicinal single-crystal substrate, the interface strain in epitaxial thin films can be well controlled by adjusting the miscut angle via a surface-step-terrace matchi...

In order to reduce the dislocation density and improve the performance of high indium content In0.82Ga0.18As films, the design of double buffer layers has been introduced into the In0.82Ga0.18As/InP heterostructure. Compared with other buffer layer structures, we introduce an InP thin layer, which is the same as the substrate, into the In0.82Ga0.18As/InP heterostructure. The epitaxial layers an...

Li-ion battery systems, synthesized as epitaxial thin films, can provide powerful insights into their electrochemical processes. Crystallographic analysis shows that many important cathode oxides have an underlying similarity: their structures can be considered as different ordering schemes of Li and transition metal ions within a pseudo-cubic sublattice of oxygen anions arranged in a face-cent...

We have isolated the effect of kinetic energy of depositing species during pulsed laser deposition (PLD) on surface morphology evolution of Ge(001) homoepitaxy at low temperature (100 °C). Using a dual molecular beam epitaxy (MBE)-PLD chamber, we compare morphology evolution from three different growth methods under identical experimental conditions except for the differing nature of the deposi...

c-axis epitaxial and polycrystalline Sr3Bi4Ti6O21 (SBTi) thin films were fabricated on (001)SrTiO3 (STO) single-crystal substrates and Pt/Ti2/SiO2/Si substrates respectively, by pulsed laser deposition (PLD). Structures of the films were systematically characterized by x-ray diffraction (XRD), including θ–2θ -scans, rocking curve scans and φ-scans, atomic force microscopy and transmission elect...

The first full scale sensor featuring fast read-out with integrated zero-suppression, called MIMOSA-26 [1], was manufactured in 2008/2009 in a 0.35 μm CMOS technology based on a standard, low resistivity, epitaxial layer. More recently, high resistivity epitaxial layers became available, reducing the thermal diffusion of the signal charges, for the benefit of the SNR and thus the radiation tole...

One interesting application of epitaxial magnetic thin films is to use them as one of the electrodes in a spin-dependent tunneling junction, in order to use the magnetocrystalline anisotropy to define the required two states of the magnetization. [1] In our preliminary work, we prepared epitaxial magnetic films on copper buffer layers grown on silicon substrates. [2] The single crystalline qual...