Background: Au nanoparticles (AuNPs) exhibit very unique physiochemical and optical properties, which now are extensively studied in a range of medical diagnostic and therapeutic applications. AuNPs can be used for cancer clinical treatment with minimal invasion. On the other hand, curcumin is a polyphenol derived from turmeric which is used for medical purposes due to its anti...

Atomic impurities are critical for many technologies. They are used to engineer the optical and electronic properties of semiconductors for applications such as transistors, solar cells, lightemitting diodes (LEDs), and lasers, as well as to store energy for applications such as batteries and electrochemical cells. While the characterization and understanding of impurities in bulk semiconductor...

In this thesis nanometer scale charge sensors are used to study charge transport in two solid state systems: Lateral GaAs quantum dots and hydrogenated amorphous silicon (a-Si:H). In both of these experiments we use time-resolved charge sensing to study electron transport in regimes that are not accessible to traditional transport measurements. For the lateral GaAs quantum dot experiments, we u...

Bound polarons are discrete, confined electronic states, spatially localized due to a local potential V(r) but sharing a common phonon state of the surrounding crystal. We study the energy states of polarons bound in a potential and determine the local optical absorption spectrum up to first-order time-dependent perturbation theory with respect to the electron-photon interaction. The model is a...

The present lecture gives the review of recent studies where acoustic solitons strongly influence the electron states in a semiconductor nanostructure. The amplitude of soliton pulses is so high that the electron states in a quantum well make temporal excursions in energy up to 10 meV. The subpicosecond duration of the solitons is less than the coherence time of the optical transition between t...

Recent advances in semiconductor nanostructure syntheses provide unprecedented control over electronic quantum confinement and have led to extensive investigations of their size- and shape-dependent optical/electrical properties. Notably, spectroscopic measurements show that optical bandgaps of one-dimensional CdSe nanowires are substantially (approximately 100 meV) lower than their zero-dimens...

The luminescence of semiconductor nanostructures is strongly dependent on their size, dimensions, morphology, composition, or defects, and their band emissions can be properly and selectively tailored through the rational manipulation of these parameters during material growth. Using spatially-resolved cathodoluminescence spectroscopy, monochromatic contrast maps and high-resolution transmissio...

A multi-band effective-mass Hamiltonian is derived for lattice-matched semiconductor nanostructures in a slowly varying external magnetic field. The theory is derived from the first-principles magnetic-field coupling Hamiltonian of Pickard and Mauri, which is applicable to nonlocal norm-conserving pseudopotentials in the local density approximation to density functional theory. The pseudopotent...

Semiconductor nanostructures have interesting electro-optic properties due to quantum confinement of electrons, strong exciton binding energies, and the possibility to tailor the bandgap and radiative emission rates. An electric field normal to the quantum well, for example, shifts the absorption edge to lower energies (red-shift) and increases the refractive index below the absorption edge all...

In this review we focus on electronic transport through semiconductor nanostructures which are driven by ac fields. Along the review we describe the available experimental information on different nanostructures, like resonant tunneling diodes, superlattices or quantum dots, together with the theoretical tools needed to describe the observed features. These theoretical tools such as, for instan...