91 research outputs found
The latent potential of YouTube - Will it become the 21st Century lecturer's film archive?
YouTube (http://www.youtube.com) is an online, public-access video-sharing
site that allows users to post short streaming-video submissions for open
viewing. Along with Google, MySpace, Facebook, etc. it is one of the great
success stories of the Internet, and is widely used by many of today's
undergraduate students. The higher education sector has recently realised the
potential of YouTube for presenting teaching resources/material to students,
and publicising research. This article considers another potential use for
online video archiving websites such as YouTube and GoogleVideo in higher
education - as an online video archive providing thousands of hours of video
footage for use in lectures. In this article I will discuss why this might be
useful, present some examples that demonstrate the potential for YouTube as a
teaching resource, and highlight some of the copyright and legal issues that
currently impact on the effective use of new online video websites, such as
YouTube, for use as a teaching resource.Comment: To be published in October 2008 issue of CAL-laborate
(http://science.uniserve.edu.au/pubs/callab/index.html
What lurks below the last plateau: Experimental studies of the 0.7 x 2e^2/h conductance anomaly in one-dimensional systems
The integer quantized conductance of one-dimensional electron systems is a
well understood effect of quantum confinement. A number of fractionally
quantized plateaus are also commonly observed. They are attributed to many-body
effects, but their precise origin is still a matter of debate, having attracted
considerable interest over the past 15 years. This review reports on
experimental studies of fractionally quantized plateaus in semiconductor
quantum point contacts and quantum wires, focusing on the 0.7 x 2e^2/h
conductance anomaly, its analogs at higher conductances, and the zero bias peak
observed in the d.c. source-drain bias for conductances less than 2e^2/h.Comment: Topical Review for J. Phys.: Condens. Matter, published version
available at http://iopscience.iop.org/0953-8984/23/44/443201/ Document is
131 pages, 43 figure
Near-thermal limit gating in heavily-doped III-V semiconductor nanowires using polymer electrolytes
Doping is a common route to reducing nanowire transistor on-resistance but
has limits. High doping level gives significant loss in gate performance and
ultimately complete gate failure. We show that electrolyte gating remains
effective even when the Be doping in our GaAs nanowires is so high that
traditional metal-oxide gates fail. In this regime we obtain a combination of
sub-threshold swing and contact resistance that surpasses the best existing
p-type nanowire MOSFETs. Our sub-threshold swing of 75 mV/dec is within 25% of
the room-temperature thermal limit and comparable with n-InP and n-GaAs
nanowire MOSFETs. Our results open a new path to extending the performance and
application of nanowire transistors, and motivate further work on improved
solid electrolytes for nanoscale device applications.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, supplementary available at journa
Piezoelectric rotator for studying quantum effects in semiconductor nanostructures at high magnetic fields and low temperatures
We report the design and development of a piezoelectric sample rotation
system, and its integration into an Oxford Instruments Kelvinox 100 dilution
refrigerator, for orientation-dependent studies of quantum transport in
semiconductor nanodevices at millikelvin temperatures in magnetic fields up to
10T. Our apparatus allows for continuous in situ rotation of a device through
>100deg in two possible configurations. The first enables rotation of the field
within the plane of the device, and the second allows the field to be rotated
from in-plane to perpendicular to the device plane. An integrated angle sensor
coupled with a closed-loop feedback system allows the device orientation to be
known to within +/-0.03deg whilst maintaining the sample temperature below
100mK.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure
The influence of atmosphere on the performance of pure-phase WZ and ZB InAs nanowire transistors
We compare the characteristics of phase-pure MOCVD grown ZB and WZ InAs
nanowire transistors in several atmospheres: air, dry pure N and O, and
N bubbled through liquid HO and alcohols to identify whether
phase-related structural/surface differences affect their response. Both WZ and
ZB give poor gate characteristics in dry state. Adsorption of polar species
reduces off-current by 2-3 orders of magnitude, increases on-off ratio and
significantly reduces sub-threshold slope. The key difference is the greater
sensitivity of WZ to low adsorbate level. We attribute this to facet structure
and its influence on the separation between conduction electrons and surface
adsorption sites. We highlight the important role adsorbed species play in
nanowire device characterisation. WZ is commonly thought superior to ZB in InAs
nanowire transistors. We show this is an artefact of the moderate humidity
found in ambient laboratory conditions: WZ and ZB perform equally poorly in the
dry gas limit yet equally well in the wet gas limit. We also highlight the
vital role density-lowering disorder has in improving gate characteristics, be
it stacking faults in mixed-phase WZ or surface adsorbates in pure-phase
nanowires.Comment: Accepted for publication in Nanotechnolog
Fractal Conductance Fluctuations of Classical Origin
In mesoscopic systems conductance fluctuations are a sensitive probe of
electron dynamics and chaotic phenomena. We show that the conductance of a
purely classical chaotic system with either fully chaotic or mixed phase space
generically exhibits fractal conductance fluctuations unrelated to quantum
interference. This might explain the unexpected dependence of the fractal
dimension of the conductance curves on the (quantum) phase breaking length
observed in experiments on semiconductor quantum dots.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, to appear in PR
Towards low-dimensional hole systems in Be-doped GaAs nanowires
GaAs was central to the development of quantum devices but is rarely used for
nanowire-based quantum devices with InAs, InSb and SiGe instead taking the
leading role. p-type GaAs nanowires offer a path to studying strongly-confined
0D and 1D hole systems with strong spin-orbit effects, motivating our
development of nanowire transistors featuring Be-doped p-type GaAs nanowires,
AuBe alloy contacts and patterned local gate electrodes towards making
nanowire-based quantum hole devices. We report on nanowire transistors with
traditional substrate back-gates and EBL-defined metal/oxide top-gates produced
using GaAs nanowires with three different Be-doping densities and various AuBe
contact processing recipes. We show that contact annealing only brings small
improvements for the moderately-doped devices under conditions of lower anneal
temperature and short anneal time. We only obtain good transistor performance
for moderate doping, with conduction freezing out at low temperature for
lowly-doped nanowires and inability to reach a clear off-state under gating for
the highly-doped nanowires. Our best devices give on-state conductivity 95 nS,
off-state conductivity 2 pS, on-off ratio ~, and sub-threshold slope 50
mV/dec at T = 4 K. Lastly, we made a device featuring a moderately-doped
nanowire with annealed contacts and multiple top-gates. Top-gate sweeps show a
plateau in the sub-threshold region that is reproducible in separate cool-downs
and indicative of possible conductance quantization highlighting the potential
for future quantum device studies in this material system
- …