the current study assesses the root causes of hydrogen blisters on low strength carbon steel equipment. for this purpose, some experiments including hardness test, non-destructive test (ndt), metallography, and fractograpghy are conducted. the microstructure of two blisters is assessed by means of optical microscopy and scanning electron microscopy (sem). the microstructural studies show that t...

Planar waveguides made of Nd 3+ -doped silicon rich silicon oxide (SRSO) and silicon rich silicon nitride (SRSN) have been fabricated by reactive magnetron sputtering and characterized with special emphasis on the comparison of the guided photoluminescence (PL) properties of these two matrices. Guided fluorescence excited by top surface pumping at 488 nm on planar waveguides was measured as a f...

We report a joint experimental and theoretical study on the structures of a series of gold clusters doped with a group-14 atom: MAux (M ) Si, Ge, Sn; x ) 5-8). Well-resolved photoelectron spectra were obtained and compared to calculations at several levels of theory to identify the low-lying structures of MAu5-8. We found that the structure of SiAu5 is dominated by the tetrahedrally coordinated...

Metal assisted chemical etching (MacEtch) is a recently developed anisotropic wet etching method that is capable of producing high aspect ratio semiconductor nanostructures from patterned metal film. In this review article, we highlight the characteristics of MacEtch of silicon (Si) including controllability of the produced sidewall roughness, the inherent high aspect ratio, the weak crystal or...

The effect of crystal plane orientation on tribochemical removal of monocrystalline silicon was investigated using an atomic force microscope. Experimental results indicated that the tribochemical removal of silicon by SiO2 microsphere presented strong crystallography-induced anisotropy. Further analysis suggested that such anisotropic tribochemical removal of silicon was not dependent on the c...

We demonstrate improved short-wavelength internal quantum efficiency (IQE) of a-Si/c-Si heterojunction (HJ) solar cells with a surface nanopillar (NP) array via simulation. The gain in IQE is attributed to the light-field modulation caused by the cavity resonance inside the NPs, in which the light energy is effectively localized within the c-Si bulk rather than the a-Si layer. The average IQE i...

The vapor—liquid—solid growth of Si whiskers from disilane has been studied in a gas source MBE system. The wire-like Si crystals are grown on Si(1 1 1) substrates in a temperature range of 600—800°C, a disilane pressure between 1]10~4 and 1]10~7 Torr, and using Au as a growth-promoting agent. The morphology of the Si whiskers is investigated. It is found that the growth rate of the vertical wi...

GaAs is grown by metal-organic vapor-phase epitaxy on a 55 nm round-hole patterned Si substrate with SiO(2) as a mask. The threading dislocations, which are stacked on the lowest energy facet plane, move along the SiO(2) walls, reducing the number of dislocations. The etching pit density of GaAs on the 55 nm round-hole patterned Si substrate is about 3.3 × 10(5) cm(-2). Compared with the full w...