BACKGROUND Focused electron beam induced deposition (FEBID) is a direct-writing technique with nanometer resolution, which has received strongly increasing attention within the last decade. In FEBID a precursor previously adsorbed on a substrate surface is dissociated in the focus of an electron beam. After 20 years of continuous development FEBID has reached a stage at which this technique is ...

Observations of the H66α recombination line from the ionized gas in the cluster of newly formed massive stars, G10.6–0.4, show that most of the continuum emission derives from the dense gas in an ionized accretion flow that forms an ionized disk or torus around a group of stars in the center of the cluster. The inward motion observed in the accretion flow suggests that despite the equivalent lu...

The development of novel photonic devices which incorporate biological materials is strongly tied to the development of thin film forming processes. Solution-based ("wet") processes when used with biomaterials in device fabrication suffer from dissolution of underlying layers, incompatibility with clean environment, inconsistent film properties, etc. We have investigated ultra-high-vacuum molec...

A bottom-up approach to nanofabricate metallic glasses from metal clusters as building blocks is presented. Considering metallic glasses as a subclass of cluster-assembled materials, the relation between the two lively fields of metal clusters and metallic glasses is pointed out. Deposition of selected clusters or collections of them, generated by state-of-the-art cluster beam sources, could le...

Electron beam deposition ~EBD! provides an inexpensive way to fabricate nanostructures of various materials in a scanning electron microscope ~SEM!. However, the purity of metals deposited from an organometallic precursor gas is impaired by simultaneously deposited carbon coming both from the organometallic molecule and the residual contamination gas in the SEM chamber. We discuss carbon-contam...

The chemical reactions of transition metal clusters in the gas phase have aroused considerable scientific interest and are also of critical scientific importance. For example, these reactions are involved in the synthesis of single-walled carbon nanotubes, which are considered ideal materials because of their outstanding properties. Alcohol catalytic chemical vapor deposition (ACCVD) is one of ...

The CIGS research effort at the University of Illinois represents a three-pronged approach to understanding and solving some of the most critical issues in CIGS device. These three prongs are: (1) development of a basic understanding of the issues limiting performance in CIGS devices, (2) advancing the performance of the devices through single crystal epitaxial layers for integration into high-...