We present experimental evidence showing that the period of the rippled surface structure induced on germanium by 1.06-microm laser pulses undergoes a discontinuous shift above a certain threshold intensity. The measured shift, as a angle of incidence of the damaging beam, is quantitatively interpreted as a transition between a regime of inhomogeneous melting controlled by radiation-remnant fie...

We propose a complete model for the oxidation of silicon-germanium. Our model is capable of predicting, as a function of time, the oxide thickness, the profile of the silicon in the underlying alloy, and the profile of germanium in the oxide. The parameters of the model vary with temperature, alloy composition and oxidizing ambient. The model shows excellent agreement with published results, wi...

The observation of pure phonon confinement effect in germanium nanowires is limited due to the illumination sensitivity of Raman spectra. In this paper we measured Raman spectra for different size germanium nanowires with different excitation laser powers and wavelengths. By eliminating the local heating effect, the phonon confinement effect for small size nanowires was clearly identified. We h...

The cross-plane thermoelectric performance of strained Si/Ge/Si superlattices is studied from a quantum point of view using the nonequilibrium Green’s function method. Strain causes the germanium well layers to turn into barriers that promote electron tunneling through the barriers. Electron tunneling produces oscillations in the Seebeck coefficient due to shift in subband energies near the Fer...

We present germanium microdisk optical resonators under a large biaxial tensile strain using a CMOS-compatible fabrication process. Biaxial tensile strain of ~0.7% is achieved by means of a stress concentration technique that allows the strain level to be customized by carefully selecting certain lithographic dimensions. The partial strain relaxation at the edges of a patterned germanium microd...

This work presents a technique for the chirality (n, m) assignment of semiconducting single wall carbon nanotubes by solving a set of empirical equations of the tight binding model parameters. The empirical equations of the nearest neighbor hopping parameters, relating the term (2n, m) with the first and second optical transition energies of the semiconducting single wall carbon nanotubes, are ...