The formation and morphological evolution of germanides formed in a ternary Ni/Ta-interlayer/Ge system were examined by ex situ and in situ annealing experiments. The Ni germanide film formed in the Ni/Ta-interlayer/Ge system maintained continuity up to 550°C, whereas agglomeration of the Ni germanide occurred in the Ni/Ge system without Ta-interlayer. Through microstructural and chemical analy...

The study focuses on the critical interlayer thickness for averting pore formation during transient liquid phase (TLP) bonding in the Cu–Sn system. Such pores are a consequence of the growth and subsequent contact of Cu6Sn5 intermetallic grains on the two surfaces to be bonded, prior to the formation of the transient liquid phase. A criterion for the critical interlayer thickness is developed, ...

Nanoindentation-induced interlayer bond switching and phase transformation in carbon nanotubes (CNTs) and graphite are simulated by molecular dynamics. Both graphite and CNTs experience a soft-to-hard phase transformation at room temperature at compressive stresses of 12 and 16 GPa, respectively. Further penetration leads to the formation of interlayer sp(3) bonds, which are reversible upon unl...

We propose a two-dimensional model for a multilayer stack of dipolar Bose-Einstein condensates formed by a strong optical lattice. We derive effective intraand interlayer dipole-dipole interaction potentials and provide simple analytical approximations for a given number of lattice sites at arbitrary polarization. We find that the interlayer dipole-dipole interaction changes the transverse aspe...

Using an external electric field, one can modulate the band gap of Bernal stacked bilayer graphene by breaking the A-[Formula: see text] symmetry. We analyze strain effects on the bilayer graphene using the extended Hückel theory and find that reduced interlayer distance results in higher band gap modulation, as expected. Furthermore, above about 2.5 Å interlayer distance, the band gap is direc...

Atomistic simulations of double-walled carbon nanotubes (DWCNTs) as rotational bearings were performed. Molecular mechanics (MM) calculations show that the interlayer energy surface of the bearings is nearly flat. Thermal effects on the bearings were studied with molecular dynamics (MD) simulations at finite temperature. These simulations show that the interlayer corrugation against rotation, a...

A new interlayer force-field for layered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) based structures is presented. The force-field contains three terms representing the interlayer attraction due to dispersive interactions, repulsion due to anisotropic overlaps of electron clouds, and monopolar electrostatic interactions. With appropriate parameterization, the potential is able to simultaneously capture wel...

The interlayer sliding potential of multilayered hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) and graphene is investigated using density-functional theory including many-body van der Waals (vdW) interactions. We find that interlayer sliding constraints can be employed to tune the contribution of electrostatic interactions and dispersive forces to the sliding energy profile, ultimately leading to different sl...

We investigate the ultralow-frequency Raman response of atomically thin ReS2, a special type of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors with unique distorted 1T structure. Bilayer and few-layer ReS2 exhibit rich Raman spectra at frequencies below 50 cm(-1), where a panoply of interlayer shear and breathing modes are observed. The emergence of these interlayer phonon modes indicate that the ReS2 lay...