23,227 research outputs found
Conductance of Atomic-Sized Lead Contacts in an Electrochemical Environment
Atomic-sized lead (Pb) contacts are deposited and dissolved in an
electrochemical environment, and their transport properties are measured. Due
to the electrochemical fabrication process, we obtain mechanically unstrained
contacts and conductance histograms with sharply resolved, individual peaks.
Charge transport calculations based on density functional theory (DFT) for
various ideal Pb contact geometries are in good agreement with the experimental
results. Depending on the atomic configuration, single-atom-wide contacts of
one and the same metal yield very different conductance values.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure
Experimental investigation of piloted flameholders
Four configurations of piloted flameholders were tested. The range of flame stabilization, flame propagation, pressure oscillation during ignition, and pressure drop of the configurations were determined. Some tests showed a very strong effect of inlet flow velocity profile and flameholder geometry on flame stabilization. These tests led to the following conclusions. (1) The use of a piloted flameholder in the turbofan augmentor may minimize the peak pressure rise during ignition. At the present experimental conditions, delta P/P asterisk over 2 is less than 10 percent; therefore, the use of a piloted flameholder is a good method to realize soft ignition. (2) The geometry of the piloted flameholder and the amount of fuel injected into the flameholder have a strong effect on the pressure oscillation during ignition of the fuel-air mixture in the secondary zone. (3) Compared with the V-gutter flameholder with holes in its wall, the V-gutter flameholder without holes not only has advantages such as simple structure and good rigidity but offers a wide combustion stability limit and a high capability of igniting the fuel-air mixture of the secondary zone
Stark effect on the exciton spectra of vertically coupled quantum dots: horizontal field orientation and non-aligned dots
We study the effect of an electric-field on an electron-hole pair in an
asymmetric system of vertically coupled self-assembled quantum dots taking into
account their non-perfect alignment. We show that the non-perfect alignment
does not qualitatively influence the exciton Stark effect for the electric
field applied in the growth direction, but can be detected by application of a
perpendicular electric field. We demonstrate that the direction of the shift
between the axes of non-aligned dots can be detected by rotation of a weak
electric field within the plane of confinement. Already for a nearly perfect
alignment the two-lowest energy bright exciton states possess antilocked
extrema as function of the orientation angle of the horizontal field which
appear when the field is parallel to the direction of the shift between the dot
centers
Algebraic-matrix calculation of vibrational levels of triatomic molecules
We introduce an accurate and efficient algebraic technique for the
computation of the vibrational spectra of triatomic molecules, of both linear
and bent equilibrium geometry. The full three-dimensional potential energy
surface (PES), which can be based on entirely {\it ab initio} data, is
parameterized as a product Morse-cosine expansion, expressed in bond-angle
internal coordinates, and includes explicit interactions among the local modes.
We describe the stretching degrees of freedom in the framework of a Morse-type
expansion on a suitable algebraic basis, which provides exact analytical
expressions for the elements of a sparse Hamiltonian matrix. Likewise, we use a
cosine power expansion on a spherical harmonics basis for the bending degree of
freedom. The resulting matrix representation in the product space is very
sparse and vibrational levels and eigenfunctions can be obtained by efficient
diagonalization techniques. We apply this method to carbonyl sulfide OCS,
hydrogen cyanide HCN, water HO, and nitrogen dioxide NO. When we base
our calculations on high-quality PESs tuned to the experimental data, the
computed spectra are in very good agreement with the observed band origins.Comment: 11 pages, 2 figures, containg additional supporting information in
epaps.ps (results in tables, which are useful but not too important for the
paper
Mechanically-Induced Transport Switching Effect in Graphene-based Nanojunctions
We report a theoretical study suggesting a novel type of electronic switching
effect, driven by the geometrical reconstruction of nanoscale graphene-based
junctions. We considered junction struc- tures which have alternative
metastable configurations transformed by rotations of local carbon dimers. The
use of external mechanical strain allows a control of the energy barrier
heights of the potential profiles and also changes the reaction character from
endothermic to exothermic or vice-versa. The reshaping of the atomic details of
the junction encode binary electronic ON or OFF states, with ON/OFF
transmission ratio that can reach up to 10^4-10^5. Our results suggest the
possibility to design modern logical switching devices or mechanophore sensors,
monitored by mechanical strain and structural rearrangements.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figure
Pre-selectable integer quantum conductance of electrochemically fabricated silver point contacts
The controlled fabrication of well-ordered atomic-scale metallic contacts is
of great interest: it is expected that the experimentally observed high
percentage of point contacts with a conductance at non-integer multiples of the
conductance quantum G_0 = 2e^2/h in simple metals is correlated to defects
resulting from the fabrication process. Here we demonstrate a combined
electrochemical deposition and annealing method which allows the controlled
fabrication of point contacts with pre-selectable integer quantum conductance.
The resulting conductance measurements on silver point contacts are compared
with tight-binding-like conductance calculations of modeled idealized junction
geometries between two silver crystals with a predefined number of contact
atoms
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