To achieve a high-efficiency silicon nanowire (SiNW) solar cell, surface passivation technique is very important because a SiNW array has a large surface area. We successfully prepared by atomic layer deposition (ALD) high-quality aluminum oxide (Al2O3) film for passivation on the whole surface of the SiNW arrays. The minority carrier lifetime of the Al2O3-depositedSiNW arrays with bulk silicon...

Hybrid nanomaterials where active battery nanoparticles are synthesized directly onto conductive additives such as graphene hold the promise of improving the cyclability and energy density of conversion and alloying type Li-ion battery electrodes. Here we investigate the evolution of hybrid reduced graphene oxide-tin sulfide (rGO-SnS2) electrodes during battery cycling. These hybrid nanoparticl...

This paper reports on a practical modification of the two-step time-multiplexed plasma etching recipe (also known as the Bosch process) to chieve high aspect-ratio sub-micron wide trenches in silicon. Mixed argon and oxygen plasma depassivation steps are introduced in between the assivation and etching phases to promote the anisotropic removal of the passivation layer at the base of the trench....

WO3 vertical plate-like arrays provide a direct pathway for charge transport, and thus hold great potential as working electrodes for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. However, surface recombination due to surface defects hinders the performance improvement. In this work, WO3 vertical plate-like arrays films with HfO2 passivation layer were fabricated via a simple dip-coating method. ...

Bulk heterojunction (BHJ) solar cells based on colloidal QDs and metal oxide nanowires (NWs) possess unique and outstanding advantages in enhancing light harvesting and charge collection in comparison to planar architectures. However, the high surface area of the NW structure often brings about a large amount of recombination (especially interfacial recombination) and limits the open-circuit vo...

We have analyzed the effects of immersion gold (i-Au) and electroless nickel (e-Ni) thickness, on the reliability of a semiconductor device which has special constraints on the absolute Ni and Au layer thickness. The electrochemical reactions involved in the deposition of immersion Au over Ni involves a substitution process by which Ni atoms are replaced by Au atoms. We demonstrate that in some...

Plasma-enhanced atom layer deposition (PEALD) can deposit denser films than those prepared by thermal ALD. But the improvement on thickness uniformity and the decrease of defect density of the films deposited by PEALD need further research. A PEALD process from trimethyl-aluminum (TMA) and oxygen plasma was investigated to study the influence of the conditions with different plasma powers and d...

In this study, the effect of different numbers of layers of reduced graphene oxide (RGO) on the ferromagnetic behavior of zinc oxide-reduced graphene oxide (ZnO-RGO) hybrid architectures has been investigated. Scanning and transmission electron microscopy along with x-ray diffraction of these hybrids confirm that ZnO nanorods are wrapped with different numbers of layers of RGO in a controlled w...

in the present work the effects of plasma nitridization on the passivation behavior of aisi 316l was investigated. to do this; nitriding treatments were carried out at 420°c for 1, 2, 4 and 16 hours. the phase composition and structure of the nitrided layer were studied by low angle x-ray diffraction and scanning electron microscopy. the hardness of samples also was evaluated by vickers microha...

We describe a systematic and efficient method of determining pseudo-atom positions and potentials for use in nanostructure calculations based on bulk empirical pseudopotentials (EPMs). Given a bulk EPM for binary semiconductor X, we produce parameters for pseudo-atoms necessary to passivate a nanostructure of X in preparation for quantum mechanical electronic structure calculations. These passi...