Nanoscopically confined polymer films are known to exhibit substantially depressed glass transition temperatures (Lg's) as compared to the corresponding bulk materials. We report here that pentacene thin films grown on polymer gate dielectrics at temperatures well below their bulk Tg's exhibit distinctive and abrupt morphological and microstructural transitions and thin-film transistor (TFT) pe...

Surface waves, named here as Dyakonov–Tamm waves, can exist at the planar interface of an isotropic dielectric material and a chiral sculptured thin film (STF). Due to the periodic nonhomogeneity of a chiral STF, the range of the refractive index of the isotropic material is smaller but the range of the propagation direction in the interface plane is much larger, in comparison to those for the ...

We investigated the dielectric response of CaCu3Ti4O12 (CCTO) thin films grown epitaxially on LaAlO3 (001) substrates by pulsed laser deposition. The dielectric response of the films was found to be strongly dominated by a power law in frequency, typical of materials with localized hopping charge carriers, in contrast to the Debye-like response of the bulk material. The film conductivity decrea...

We model the first stage of the electronic interaction between an ion and a metal surface covered with a thin dielectric layer. Specifically, we seek to answer two questions. (i) As an ion approaches the surface from far away, does the first electron that it captures originate from the exposed dielectric layer or the metal underneath it? (ii) What is the ion’s distance from the metal when the f...

A new technique is introduced for both the excitation and the detection of vibrations of micromechanical skuctures. This makes use of a dielectric thin film, sandwiched between lower and upper electrodes, on top of the vibrating structure. The excitation is based on elecbrostatic forces between the charged electrodes, causing deformation of the dielectric film and bending of the multilayer stru...

Temperature dependences of the dielectric properties of ultrathin polyvinylidene fluoride films prepared using the Langmuir–Blodgett method were studied by linear and nonlinear dielectric spectroscopy. It is shown that ultrathin Langmuir films of polyvinylidene fluoride exhibit a manifestation of a first-order ferroelectric phase transition, which can be assigned to the interaction between the ...

The thin-film dielectric response of organic films confined within a surface forces apparatus ~SFA! and also between parallel sheets of atomically smooth mica is reported for the first time. Analysis is presented to infer dielectric properties of the organic film from the measured capacitance of the total system: sample, and mica sheets intervening between sample and electrodes. Measurements co...

Unintentionally formed nanocrystalline graphene (nc-G) can act as a useful seed for the large-area synthesis of a hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) thin film with an atomically flat surface that is comparable to that of exfoliated single-crystal h-BN. A wafer-scale dielectric h-BN thin film was successfully synthesized on a bare sapphire substrate by assistance of nc-G, which prevented structural ...

Benjamin A. Mazin, Daniel Sank, Sean McHugh, Erik A. Lucero, Andrew Merrill, Jiansong Gao, David Pappas, David Moore, and Jonas Zmuidzinas Department of Physics, University of California–Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106-9530, USA National Institute of Standards and Technology, Boulder, Colorado 80305-3328, USA Department of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Ca...