Bandgap engineering in semiconductor alloy nanomaterials with widely tunable compositions

Over the past decade, tremendous progress has been achieved in the development of nanoscale semiconductor materials with a wide range of bandgaps by alloying different individual semiconductors. These materials include traditional II-VI and III-V semiconductors and their alloys, inorganic and hybrid perovskites, and the newly emerging 2D materials. One important common feature of these materials is that their nanoscale dimensions result in a large tolerance to lattice mismatches within a monolithic structure of varying composition or between the substrate and target material, which enables us to achieve almost arbitrary control of the variation of the alloy composition. As a result, the bandgaps of these alloys can be widely tuned without the detrimental defects that are often unavoidable in bulk materials, which have a much more limited tolerance to lattice mismatches. This class of nanomaterials could have a far-reaching impact on a wide range of photonic applications, including tunable lasers, solid-state lighting, artificial photosynthesis and new solar cells

Dynamical excitations in the collision of 2D Bose-Einstein condensates

We carry out simulations of the collision of two components of an adiabatically divided, quasi-2D BEC. We identify under, over and critically damped regimes in the dipole oscillations of the components according to the balance of internal and centre-of-mass (c.m.) energies of the components and investigate the creation of internal excitations. We distinguish the behaviour of this system from previous studies of quasi-1D BEC's. In particular we note that the nature of the internal excitations is only essentially sensitive to an initial phase difference between the components in the overdamped regime.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figure

Simulating quantum transport for a quasi-one-dimensional Bose gas in an optical lattice: the choice of fluctuation modes in the truncated Wigner approximation

We study the effect of quantum fluctuations on the dynamics of a quasi-one-dimensional Bose gas in an optical lattice at zero-temperature using the truncated Wigner approximation with a variety of basis sets for the initial fluctuation modes. The initial spatial distributions of the quantum fluctuations are very different when using a limited number of plane-wave (PW), simple-harmonic-oscillator (SHO) and self-consistently determined Bogoliubov (SCB) modes. The short-time transport properties of the Bose gas, characterized by the phase coherence in the PW basis are distinct from those gained using the SHO and SCB basis. The calculations using the SCB modes predict greater phase decoherence and stronger number fluctuations than the other choices. Furthermore, we observe that the use of PW modes overestimates the extent to which atoms are expelled from the core of the cloud, while the use of the other modes only breaks the cloud structure slightly which is in agreement with the experimental observations [1].Comment: 12 pages, 5 figure