Roughness Analysis In Strained Silicon-on-insulator Wires And Films

Strained silicon is used to enhance performance in state-of-the-art CMOS. Under device operating conditions, the effect of strain is to reduce the carrier scattering at the channel by a smoother semiconductor surface. This has never been completely understood. This paper gives first evidence of the variation in surface roughness under realistic strained conditions. At the nanoscale, the SiO2/Si interface roughness is dependent on the scale of observation (self-affinity). To date, there is no experimental study of the SiO2/Si interface roughness scaling with strain. This work presents the effect of uniaxial and biaxial strains on the surface roughness of strained silicon-on-insulator films and wires using atomic force microscopy. Levels of strain ranging from 0% to 2.3%, encompassing those used in present CMOS devices have been investigated. It is shown that the silicon surface is affected by uniaxial and biaxial strains differently. Three surface roughness parameters have been analyzed: root mean square roughness, correlation length, and the Hurst exponent, which is used to describe the scaling behavior of a self-affine surface. The results show that the root mean square roughness decreases (up to ∼ 40%) with increasing tensile strain, whereas the correlation length increases (up to ∼ 63nm/%) with increasing tensile strain. The Hurst exponent also varies with strain and with the undulation wavelength regime (between ∼ 0.8 and 0.2). This dependency explains why some models used to determine the carrier mobility from experiments fit the data better with a Gaussian form, whereas other models fit the data better with an exponential form.11612EPSRC; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research CouncilSong, Y., Zhou, H., Xu, Q., Luo, J., Yin, H., Yan, J., Zhong, H., (2011) J. Electron. Mater., 40, p. 1584Lee, M.L., Fitzgerald, E.A., Bulsara, M.T., Currie, M.T., Lochtefeld, A., (2005) J. Appl. 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Open Heterotic Strings

We classify potential cosmic strings according to the topological charge measurable outside the string core. We conjecture that in string theory it is this charge that governs the stability of long strings. This would imply that the SO(32) heterotic string can have endpoints, but not the E_8 x E_8 heterotic string. We give various arguments in support of this conclusion.Comment: 15 pages. v.2: typos, references correcte

The shellfish enigma across the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in southern Scandinavia

The well-known and widespread replacement of oysters (abundant during the Mesolithic period) by cockles and mussels in many Danish Stone Age shell middens ca. 5900 cal yrs BP coincides with the transition to agriculture in southern Scandinavia. This human resource shift is commonly believed to reflect changing resource availability, driven by environmental and/or climatic change at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition rather than cultural choice. While several hypotheses have been proposed to explain the “Mesolithic-Neolithic oyster decline”, an explanation based on a sudden freshening of the inner Danish waters has received most attention. Here, for the first time, we test and refute this long-standing hypothesis that declining salinity explains the marked reduction in oysters identified within numerous shell middens across coastal Denmark at the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition using quantitative and qualitative salinity inference from several, independent proxies (diatoms, molluscs and foraminifera) from multiple Danish fjord sites. Alternatively, we attribute the oyster decline to other environmental causes (particularly changing sedimentation), ultimately driven by external climatic forcing. Critical application of such high-quality environmental archives can reinvigorate archaeological debates and can aid in understanding and managing environmental change in increasingly impacted coastal regions

Mass spectrum of the axial-vector hidden charmed and hidden bottom tetraquark states

In this article, we perform a systematic study of the mass spectrum of the axial-vector hidden charmed and hidden bottom tetraquark states using the QCD sum rules, and identify the $Z^+(4430)$ as an axial-vector tetraquark state tentatively.Comment: 24 pages, 38 figures, slight revisio

Fish Spawning Aggregations: Where Well-Placed Management Actions Can Yield Big Benefits for Fisheries and Conservation

Marine ecosystem management has traditionally been divided between fisheries management and biodiversity conservation approaches, and the merging of these disparate agendas has proven difficult. Here, we offer a pathway that can unite fishers, scientists, resource managers and conservationists towards a single vision for some areas of the ocean where small investments in management can offer disproportionately large benefits to fisheries and biodiversity conservation. Specifically, we provide a series of evidenced-based arguments that support an urgent need to recognize fish spawning aggregations (FSAs) as a focal point for fisheries management and conservation on a global scale, with a particular emphasis placed on the protection of multispecies FSA sites. We illustrate that these sites serve as productivity hotspots - small areas of the ocean that are dictated by the interactions between physical forces and geomorphology, attract multiple species to reproduce in large numbers and support food web dynamics, ecosystem health and robust fisheries. FSAs are comparable in vulnerability, importance and magnificence to breeding aggregations of seabirds, sea turtles and whales yet they receive insufficient attention and are declining worldwide. Numerous case-studies confirm that protected aggregations do recover to benefit fisheries through increases in fish biomass, catch rates and larval recruitment at fished sites. The small size and spatio-temporal predictability of FSAs allow monitoring, assessment and enforcement to be scaled down while benefits of protection scale up to entire populations. Fishers intuitively understand the linkages between protecting FSAs and healthy fisheries and thus tend to support their protection

D-brane Deconstructions in IIB Orientifolds

With model building applications in mind, we collect and develop basic techniques to analyze the landscape of D7-branes in type IIB compact Calabi-Yau orientifolds, in three different pictures: F-theory, the D7 worldvolume theory and D9-anti-D9 tachyon condensation. A significant complication is that consistent D7-branes in the presence of O7^- planes are generically singular, with singularities locally modeled by the Whitney Umbrella. This invalidates the standard formulae for charges, moduli space and flux lattice dimensions. We infer the correct formulae by comparison to F-theory and derive them independently and more generally from the tachyon picture, and relate these numbers to the closed string massless spectrum of the orientifold compactification in an interesting way. We furthermore give concrete recipes to explicitly and systematically construct nontrivial D-brane worldvolume flux vacua in arbitrary Calabi-Yau orientifolds, illustrate how to read off D-brane flux content, enhanced gauge groups and charged matter spectra from tachyon matrices, and demonstrate how brane recombination in general leads to flux creation, as required by charge conservation and by equivalence of geometric and gauge theory moduli spaces.Comment: 49 pages, v2: two references adde

Measurement of K^+K^- production in two-photon collisions in the resonant-mass region

K^+K^- production in two-photon collisions has been studied using a large data sample of 67 fb^{-1} accumulated with the Belle detector at the KEKB asymmetric e^+e^- collider. We have measured the cross section for the process gamma gamma -> K^+ K^- for center-of-mass energies between 1.4 and 2.4 GeV, and found three new resonant structures in the energy region between 1.6 and 2.4 GeV. The angular differential cross sections have also been measured.Comment: 24 pages, 8 figures, to appear in Euro. Phys. Jour.

Search for the Electric Dipole Moment of the tau Lepton

We have searched for a CP violation signature arising from an electric dipole moment (d_tau) of the tau lepton in the e+e- -> tau+tau- reaction. Using an optimal observable method and 29.5 fb^{-1} of data collected with the Belle detector at the KEKB collider at sqrt{s} = 10.58 GeV, we find Re(d_tau) = (1.15 +- 1.70) x 10^{-17} ecm and Im(d_tau) = (-0.83 +- 0.86) x 10^{-17} ecm and set the 95% confidence level limits -2.2 < Re(d_tau) < 4.5 (10^{-17}ecm) and -2.5 < Im(d_tau) < 0.8 (10^{-17}ecm).Comment: 15 pages, LaTeX, 21 figures, submitted to Phys. Lett.

Search for neutrinoless decays tau -> 3l

We have searched for neutrinoless tau lepton decays into three charged leptons using an 87.1 fb^{-1} data sample collected with the Belle detector at the KEKB e^+e^- collider. Since the number of signal candidate events is compatible with that expected from the background, we set 90% confidence level upper limits on the branching fractions in the range (1.9-3.5) x 10^{-7} for various decay modes tau -> l l l where l represents e or mu.Comment: 12 pages, 4figure