Push clocks: a new approach to charge-coupled devices clocking

A new approach to charge-coupled device clocking has been developed—dynamic push clocks. With dynamic push clocks, the charge is transferred by pushing it from one storage site to another. The push clock approach results in a larger signal dynamic range, larger signal-to-noise ratio, and better performance at both high and low frequencies

Locality and topology in the molecular Aharonov-Bohm effect

It is shown that the molecular Aharonov-Bohm effect is neither nonlocal nor topological in the sense of the standard magnetic Aharonov-Bohm effect. It is further argued that there is a close relationship between the molecular Aharonov-Bohm effect and the Aharonov-Casher effect for an electrically neutral spin$-{1/2}$ particle encircling a line of charge.Comment: 3 pages, no figure

Schottky Barrier Gate Field Effect Transistor

An obvious addition to the ever-growing family of field-effect devices is a field-effect transistor with a Schottky barrier gate. It is the purpose of this correspondence 1) to demonstrate that indeed such a device does function as expected and 2) to point out several advantages of such a structure under certain circumstances. A schematic cross section of the device is shown in Fig. 1. The gate consists of a metal in intimate contact with the clean semiconductor surface. Clearly the ohmic contacts can be placed either on top of or under the semiconductor layer

The Tunnel-Emission Amplifier

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Electronic Current Flow Through Ideal Dielectric Films

During the past few decades a large literature has accumulated on the subject of current flow through dielectric films. Much of this material contains detailed analyses of many physical effects and a great deal of multiparameter curve fitting. Until recently all this activity had given the field a rather bad name, since it appeared that all effects were very complicated and nothing could be understood in a first-principles way. It is true, in fact, that in many thin-film systems the current flow is dominated by impurities, trapping processes, and so on, so that no simple, clear picture emerges for the mechanism of current flow. However, in the past few years it has become clear that certain insulating materials behave in a nearly ideal fashion and can be understood in a very simple and fundamental way. In this chapter I shall not attempt to discuss the mass of literature dealing with data on dielectrics that were not well characterized and well understood. Instead, I shall concentrate on examples in which nearly ideal behavior was observed and in which the simple physics of the current-flow processes is clear. In retrospect it seems obvious that much of the previous data is also understandable on rather simple grounds and that there were a number of conceptual errors that led to the belief that vastly complicated processes were involved. This is by no means true for all the data in the literature, but certainly with good hindsight resulting from a clear understanding of ideal materials, a much better understanding of the nonideal cases is also possible. Since the details of all the results I shall cite are available in the published literature, I shall discuss only the ideas and basic principles involved and give references where a more complete discussion may be found

Photothresholds in Mg_2Ge

Optical absorption and surface barrier photoresponse measurements have been made on cleaved samples of Mg_2Ge. The form of the results obtained from both techniques indicates an indirect transition at approximately 0.54 eV followed by a direct transition at approximately 1.8 eV

Physics of Interfaces

It has long been known that when a metal is placed in contact with a semiconductor a rectifying contact often results. This rectification is a result of an energy barrier between the metal and the semiconductor. In order to form a nonrectifying or ohmic contact, two general approaches can be applied: either (1) the barrier energy can be reduced to a low enough value that the thermally excited current over the barrier is large enough for the application involved or (2) the semiconductor can be doped to a high carrier density to allow quantum mechanical tunneling to take place. The physical principles of these processes are discussed in this article

Some Properties of Exponentially Damped Wave Functions

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Relativity and the Scientific Method

The recent PROCEEDINGS article by J. R. Pierce has triggered considerable adverse comment on Einstein's Theory of Relativity. In the maze of detail which was discussed, one very important principle was all but forgotten, i.e., the operation of the scientific method