The optical band gap is a basic property of optical materials. The measured band gap depends not only on the material but also on its characteristics such as crystallinity and stoichiometry. The optical band gap of chromium aluminum oxide films was measured and calculated by three different methods. Firstly, we used the conventional experimental-graphical method, which is commonly used. However...

Phase Change Materials (PCMs) are unique compounds employed in non-volatile random access memory thanks to the rapid and reversible transformation between the amorphous and crystalline state that display large differences in electrical and optical properties. In addition to the amorphous-to-crystalline transition, experimental results on polycrystalline GeSbTe alloys (GST) films evidenced a Met...

Dirac, triple-point, andWeyl fermions represent three topological semimetal phases, characterized with a descending degree of band degeneracy, which have been realized separately in specific crystalline materials with different lattice symmetries. Here we demonstrate an alloy engineering approach to realize all three types of fermions in one single material system of MgTa2−xNbxN3. Based on symm...

We discuss the macroscopic properties of several classes of polar liquid crystalline phases. We focus on polar biaxial liquid crystalline phases made of achiral molecules with ̄uidity in two and three spatial dimensions. The classes we examine include polar biaxial nematic phases, orthogonal biaxial smectic phases with anisotropic in-plane ̄uidity and tilted polar biaxial smectic phases with in...

Overview: Stability experiments indicate that amorphous sulfate phases may be important constituents of martian surface materials [1-2]; there is also considerable spectral evidence for non-crystalline sulfate phases on Europa [3-4]. However, the thermal infrared (TIR) and near-infrared (NIR) spectral characteristics of these phases are largely unknown. X-ray amorphous Mg-and Fe-sulfate phases ...

Electronic phase-change memory devices take advantage of the different resistivity of two states, amorphous and crystalline, and the swift transitions between them in active phase-change materials (PCMs). In addition to these two distinct phases, multiple resistive states can be obtained by tuning the atomic disorder in the crystalline phase with heat treatment, because the disorder can lead to...

The technique of deuterium magnetic resonance was used to study the orientational order of the perdeuterated acyl chains of dimyristoylphosphatidylcholine (DMPC-d54) reconstituted with rhodopsin between 0 and 23 degrees C. This range includes the gel to liquid crystalline phase transition of DMPC-d54 at 20 degrees C. Molar lipid/protein (L/P) ratios of L/P = infinity, 150, 50, 30, and 12 were i...

Thermodynamics drive crystalline organic molecules to be crystallized at temperatures below their melting point. Even though molecules can form supercooled liquids by rapid cooling, crystalline organic materials readily undergo a phase transformation to an energetically favorable crystalline phase upon subsequent heat treatment. Opposite to this general observation, here, we report molecular de...

Ge-Sb-Te alloys, which belong to the phase-change materials, are promising materials for data storage and display and data visualization applications due to their unique properties. This includes a remarkable difference of their electrical and optical properties in the amorphous and crystalline state. Pronounced change of optical properties for Ge-Sb-Te alloys is linked to the different bonding...

Cyclodextrin (CD)/surfactant complexes were usually believed to be quite soluble in water and unable to form aggregates because of the hydrophilic outer surface. However, in this work, SDS@2b-CD complex is found to be able to self-assemble into well-defined lamellar structures in concentrated aqueous solution. The lamellae possess unprecedented in-plane solid-crystalline order in addition to cl...