Magnetic shape memory alloys display magnetic-field-induced strain (MFIS) of up to 10% as single crystals. Polycrystalline materials are much easier to create but display a near-zero MFIS because twinning of neighboring grains introduces strain incompatibility, leading to high internal stresses. Pores reduce these incompatibilities between grains and thus increase the MFIS of polycrystalline Ni...

UNLABELLED Graded anisotropy magnetic materials possess a coercive field changing laterally with position. A simple fabrication procedure to produce such an anisotropy gradient in a polycrystalline Au/Co layer system without lateral thickness variation and with perpendicular magnetic anisotropy, prototypical for a large variety of thin film systems, is shown. The procedure uses light-ion bombar...

Thin-film polycrystalline semiconductors are currently at the forefront of inexpensive large-area solar cell and integrated circuit technologies because of their reduced processing and substrate selection constraints. Understanding the extent to which structural and electronic defects influence carrier transport in these materials is critical to controlling the optoelectronic properties, yet ma...

The trapping of electrons by grain boundaries in semiconducting and insulating materials is important for a wide range of physical problems, for example, relating to: electroceramic materials with applications as sensors, varistors and fuel cells, reliability issues for solar cell and semiconductor technologies and electromagnetic seismic phenomena in the Earth's crust. Surprisingly, considerin...

ELECTRONIC AND OPTICAL MATERIALS A: Amorphous and Polycrystalline Thin-Film Silicon Science and Technology B: Concepts in Molecular and Organic Electronics C: CMOS Gate-Stack Scaling—Materials, Interfaces, and Reliability Implications D: Materials, Processes, and Reliability for Advanced Interconnects for Microand Nano-Electronics E: Science and Technology of Chemical Mechanical Planarization F...

The hallmark of materials science is the ability to tailor the structures of a given material to provide a desired response. In this work, the structures involving crystallinity and crystallographic orientation of Cu nanowires electrochemically fabricated in ion-track templates have been investigated as a function of fabrication condition. Both single crystalline and polycrystalline nanowires w...

II-VI semiconductors form an important class of opto-electronic materials. CdSe is a promising material for the fabrication of photovoltaic devices. Polycrystalline CdSe films have been deposited onto ultra clean glass substrates by sintering process. The optical band gap of these films was determined by reflectance measurements in wavelength range 400-850 nm. The band gap of these films was ob...

Vibration damping in polycrystalline TbDy alloys was studied at cryogenic temperatures. Mechanical hysteretic losses were measured at various strains, frequencies, and loading configurations at 77 K. Some textured TbDy materials demonstrated 22.6% energy dissipation in mechanical measurements at low frequency ~0.01 Hz! and a mean logarithmic decrement of 0.23 at a higher frequency ~25 kHz!. Ult...

Non-180° ferroelectric domains are also ferroelastic domains; their existence in polycrystalline materials is to relieve internal stresses generated during solid-solid phase transitions and minimize the elastic distortion energy. Therefore, grains with random orientations in polycrystalline ceramics are always occupied by many domains, especially in the regions close to grain boundaries. In thi...

We present a scale-bridging approach for modeling the integral elastic response of polycrystalline composite that is based on a multi-disciplinary combination of (i) parameter-free first-principles calculations of thermodynamic phase stability and single-crystal elastic stiffness; and (ii) homogenization schemes developed for polycrystalline aggregates and composites. The modeling is used as a ...