WSiN films were produced through hybrid pulse direct current/radio frequency magnetron co-sputtering and evaluated as diffusion barriers for Cu metallization. The Cu/WSiN/Si assemblies annealed 1 h in a vacuum at 500–900 °C. structural stability barrier performance of the explored X-ray diffraction, Auger electron spectroscopy, sheet resistance measurement. results indicated that Si content inc...

Tight-binding molecular dynamics and density-functional simulations on silicon seeded with a di-interstitial reveal its detailed diffusion mechanisms. The lowest-energy di-interstitial performs a translation/rotation diffusion-step with a barrier of 0.3 eV and a prefactor of 11 THz followed by a reorientation diffusion step with a 90 meV barrier and a 2300 THz prefactor. The intermediate reorie...

We demonstrate the level crossing phenomenon for fermions in the background field of the sphaleron barrier, by numerically determining the fermion eigenvalues along the minimal energy path from one vacuum to another. We assume that the fermions of a doublet are degenerate in mass, allowing for spherically symmetric ansätze for all of the fields, when the mixing angle dependence is neglected.

A new maximum angle method has been developed to determine surface mixed-layer (a general name for isothermal/constant-density layer) depth from profile data. It has three steps: (1) fitting the profile data with a first vector (pointing downward) from an upper level to a depth and a second vector (pointing downward) from that depth to a deeper level; (2) identifying the angle (varying with dep...

Risk-shifting incentive problem in financial contracting, which typically arises in the context of a lenderborrower relationship, stands for the borrower’s incentive to influence the risk of his project. Thus, the borrower can increase the value of his payoff at the expense of the lender. However, the lender also may have a risk incentive under some circumstances so that he may render it diffic...

A microscopic description of Hawking radiation in sonic black holes has been recently presented [1]. This exactly solvable model is formulated in terms of onedimensional scattering of a Fermi gas. In this paper, the model is extended to account possible finite size effects of a realistic geometry. The flow of particles is maintained by a piston (i.e. an impenetrable barrier) moving slowly towar...

A realistic assessment of future interconnect performance is addressed, specifically, by modeling copper (Cu) wire effective resistivity in the light of technological and reliability constraints. The scaling-induced rise in resistance in the future may be significantly exacerbated due to an increase in Cu resistivity itself, through both electron surface scattering and diffusion barrier effect....

We investigate the long-time and long-range behavior of branching diffusion processes (starting with a single particle) in two different situations: when the branching potential has compact support and when it is constant. For compactly supported branching potentials, the qualitative behavior of the processes depends on the intensity of the branching. We analyze the super-critical case, when th...