A new era of spectroscopy: SINFONI, NIR integral field spectroscopy at the diffraction limit of an 8m telescope

SINFONI, the SINgle Faint Object Near-infrared Investigation, is an instrument for the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which will start its operation mid 2002 and allow for the first time near infrared (NIR) integral field spectroscopy at the diffraction limit of an 8-m telescope. SINFONI is the combination of two state-of-the art instruments, the integral field spectrometer SPIFFI, built by the Max-Planck-Institut fuer extraterrestrische Physik (MPE), and the adaptive optics (AO) system MACAO, built by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). It will allow a unique type of observations by delivering simultaneously high spatial resolution (pixel sizes 0.025arcsec to 0.25arcsec) and a moderate spectral resolution (R~2000 to R~4500), where the higher spectral resolution mode will allow for software OH suppression. This opens new prospects for astronomy.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, to appear in SPIE proceedings "Astronomical Telescopes and Instrumentation 2000". More recent sensitivity estimates are available at http://www.mpe.mpg.de/www_ir/ir_instruments/sinfoni/spiffi.ht

Electronic properties of disordered corner-sharing tetrahedral lattices

We have examined the behaviour of noninteracting electrons moving on a corner-sharing tetrahedral lattice into which we introduce a uniform (box) distribution, of width W, of random on-site energies. We have used both the relative localization length and the spectral rigidity to analyze the nature of the eigenstates, and have determined both the mobility edge trajectories as a function of W, and the critical disorder, Wc, beyond which all states are localized. We find (i) that the mobility edge trajectories (energies Ec vs. disorder W) are qualitatively different from those found for a simple cubic lattice, and (ii) that the spectral rigidity is scale invariant at Wc and thus provides a reliable method of estimating this quantity -- we find Wc/t=14.5. We discuss our results in the context of the metal-to-insulator transition undergone by LiAlyTi{2-y}O4 in a quantum site percolation model that also includes the above-mentioned Anderson disorder, and show that the effects produced by Anderson disorder are far less important than those produced by quantum site percolation, at least in the determination of the doping concentration at which the metal-to-insulator transition is predicted to occur

Multifractal analysis of the metal-insulator transition in anisotropic systems

We study the Anderson model of localization with anisotropic hopping in three dimensions for weakly coupled chains and weakly coupled planes. The eigenstates of the Hamiltonian, as computed by Lanczos diagonalization for systems of sizes up to $48^3$, show multifractal behavior at the metal-insulator transition even for strong anisotropy. The critical disorder strength $W_c$ determined from the system size dependence of the singularity spectra is in a reasonable agreement with a recent study using transfer matrix methods. But the respective spectrum at $W_c$ deviates from the ``characteristic spectrum'' determined for the isotropic system. This indicates a quantitative difference of the multifractal properties of states of the anisotropic as compared to the isotropic system. Further, we calculate the Kubo conductivity for given anisotropies by exact diagonalization. Already for small system sizes of only $12^3$ sites we observe a rapidly decreasing conductivity in the directions with reduced hopping if the coupling becomes weaker.Comment: 25 RevTeX pages with 10 PS-figures include

Mixing-induced anisotropic correlations in molecular crystalline systems

We investigate the structure of mixed thin films composed of pentacene (PEN) and diindenoperylene (DIP) using X-ray reflectivity and grazing incidence X-ray diffraction. For equimolar mixtures we observe vanishing in-plane order coexisting with an excellent out-of-plane order, a yet unreported disordering behavior in binary mixtures of organic semiconductors, which are crystalline in their pure form. One approach to rationalize our findings is to introduce an anisotropic interaction parameter in the framework of a mean field model. By comparing the structural properties with those of other mixed systems, we discuss the effects of sterical compatibility and chemical composition on the mixing behavior, which adds to the general understanding of interactions in molecular mixtures.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev. Let