The mechanical properties of materials depend strongly on crystal structure and defect configuration. Here we measure the strength of suspended single-crystal and bicrystal graphene membranes prepared by chemical vapour deposition. Membranes of interest are first characterized by transmission electron microscopy and subsequently tested using atomic force microscopy. Single-crystal membranes pre...

Vertically aligned carbon nanotubes were selectively grown at temperatures as low as 120 8C by plasma enhanced chemical vapour deposition. We investigated the effects of acetylene, ethylene and methane as carbon source gases together with ammonia as an etchant and nickel as catalyst material. The diluted acetylene plasma gave the highest nanotube growth rate and showed the most intense C Swan b...

Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapour Deposition (PECVD) is one of the main plasma processes which induce charging damage to gate oxides during the VLSI processes. All the previous studies, however, describe the charging phenomena only at the beginning of PECVD process, when a very thin oxide layer covers the metal lines. We present and analyze in this paper, a new strong charging phenomenon in the e...

We have investigated the effect of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) adsorption on a graphene field-effect-transistor (FET) device. We have used graphene which is grown on a Ni substrate by chemical vapour deposition. The Raman spectra of our graphene indicate its high quality, and also show that it consists of only a few layers. The current-voltage characteristics of our bare graphene strip FET show...

Lanthanides are vital components in lighting, imaging technologies and future quantum memory applications owing to their narrow optical transitions and long spin coherence times. Recently, diamond has become a pre-eminent platform for the realisation of many experiments in quantum information science. Here we demonstrate a promising approach to incorporate Eu ions into diamond, providing a mean...

We propose and evaluate the use of metallocene compounds as reducing agents for the chemical vapour deposition (and specifically atomic layer deposition, ALD) of the transition metal Cu from metalorganic precursors. Ten different transition metal cyclopentadienyl compounds are screened for their utility in the reduction of Cu from five different Cu precursors by evaluating model reaction energi...

BACKGROUND The development of whole smoke exposure systems have been driven by the fact that traditional smoke exposure techniques are based on the particulate phase of tobacco smoke and not the complete smoke aerosol. To overcome these challenges in this study, we used a Vitrocell® VC 10 whole smoke exposure system. For characterisation purposes, we determined smoke deposition in relationship ...

The effect of thickness of the high-temperature (HT) AlN buffer layer on the properties of GaN grown on Si(1 1 1) has been investigated. Optical microscopy (OM), atomic force microscopy (AFM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD) are employed to characterize these samples grown by metal-organic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). The results demonstrate that the morphology and crystalline properties of th...

GaN films were grown on (100) GaAs substrates by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition and were found to be of (200) cubic or (111) cubit/(0002) hexagonal phase. Their photoluminescence characteristics remained invariant with material phase. We report assignment of band-edge photoluminescence near 3!36 eV and 3.15-3.31 eV in apparently cubic GaN to intrinsic/bound excitons and phonon-assisted,...