441 research outputs found
Order-disorder and ionic conductivity in calcium nitride-hydride
Prof John TS Irvine and Prof Martin Owen Jones: STFC 5005—Development of Combined In situ Neutron Diffraction and Electrochemical Studies.Recently nitrogen-hydrogen compounds have successfully been applied as co-catalysts for mild conditions ammonia synthesis. Ca2NH was shown to act as a H2 sink during reaction, with H atoms from its lattice being incorporated into the NH3(g) product. Thus the ionic transport and diffusion properties of the N–H co-catalyst are fundamentally important to understanding and developing such syntheses. Here we show hydride ion conduction in these materials. Two distinct calcium nitride-hydride Ca2NH phases, prepared via different synthetic paths are found to show dramatically different properties. One phase (β) shows fast hydride ionic conduction properties (0.08 S/cm at 600 °C), on a par with the best binary ionic hydrides and 10 times higher than CaH2, whilst the other (α) is 100 times less conductive. An in situ combined analysis techniques reveals that the effective β-phase conducts ions via a vacancy-mediated phenomenon in which the charge carrier concentration is dependent on the ion concentration in the secondary site and by extension the vacancy concentration in the main site.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe
The structural, geometric and volumetric changes of a polythermal Arctic glacier during a surge cycle:Comfortlessbreen, Svalbard
Simultaneous estimation of the supply and demand for household location in a multizoned metropolitan area
Low voltage control of ferromagnetism in a semiconductor p-n junction
The concept of low-voltage depletion and accumulation of electron charge in
semiconductors, utilized in field-effect transistors (FETs), is one of the
cornerstones of current information processing technologies. Spintronics which
is based on manipulating the collective state of electron spins in a
ferromagnet provides complementary technologies for reading magnetic bits or
for the solid-state memories. The integration of these two distinct areas of
microelectronics in one physical element, with a potentially major impact on
the power consumption and scalability of future devices, requires to find
efficient means for controlling magnetization electrically. Current induced
magnetization switching phenomena represent a promising step towards this goal,
however, they relay on relatively large current densities. The direct approach
of controlling the magnetization by low-voltage charge depletion effects is
seemingly unfeasible as the two worlds of semiconductors and metal ferromagnets
are separated by many orders of magnitude in their typical carrier
concentrations. Here we demonstrate that this concept is viable by reporting
persistent magnetization switchings induced by short electrical pulses of a few
volts in an all-semiconductor, ferromagnetic p-n junction.Comment: 11 pages, 4 figure
- …