GaAs(111)A and B in hydrazine sulfide solutions : extreme polarity dependence of surface adsorption processes

Chemical bonds formed by hydrazine-sulfide treatment of GaAs(111) were studied by synchrotron photoemission spectroscopy. At the B surface, the top arsenic atoms are replaced by nitrogen atoms, while GaAs(111)A is covered by sulfur, also bonded to underlying gallium, despite the sulfide molar concentration being 103 times smaller than that of the hydrazine. This extreme dependence on surface polarity is explained by competitive adsorption processes of HS- and OH- anions and of hydrazine molecules, on Ga- adsorption sites, which have distinct configurations on the A and B surfaces

Absence of an intrinsic value for the surface recombination velocity in doped semiconductors

A self-consistent expression for the surface recombination velocity $S$ and the surface Fermi level unpinning energy as a function of light excitation power ($P$) is presented for n- and p-type semiconductors doped above the 10$^{16}$ cm$^{-3}$ range. Measurements of $S$ on p-type GaAs films using a novel polarized microluminescence technique are used to illustrate two limiting cases of the model. For a naturally oxidized surface $S$ is described by a power law in $P$ whereas for a passivated surface $S^{-1}$ varies logarithmically with $P$. Furthermore, the variation in $S$ with surface state density and bulk doping level is found to be the result of Fermi level unpinning rather than a change in the intrinsic surface recombination velocity. It is concluded that $S$ depends on $P$ throughout the experimentally accessible range of excitation powers and therefore that no instrinsic value can be determined. Previously reported values of $S$ on a range of semiconducting materials are thus only valid for a specific excitation power.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Wet chemical nitridation of GaAs (100) by hydrazine solution for surface passivation

A mild wet nitridation procedure using hydrazine-based solutions has been developed for GaAs (100) surface passivation. Both x-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and spectroscopic ellipsometry show that this nitridation procedure results in a very thin, coherent, and homogeneous GaN layer that is very stable in air. Photoluminescence data show a strong enhancement of the intensity as compared to that of an as-cleaned GaAs sample, indicating that this nitrided layer provides both chemical and electronic passivation of GaAs surfaces. The chemical mechanism of nitridation is discusse

Increasing Support for Contraception as HIV Prevention: Stakeholder Mapping to Identify Influential Individuals and Their Perceptions

BACKGROUND: Voluntary contraceptive use by HIV-positive women currently prevents more HIV-positive births, at a lower cost, than anti-retroviral drug (ARV) regimens. Despite this evidence, most prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) programs focus solely on providing ARV prophylaxis to pregnant women and rarely include the prevention of unintended pregnancies among HIV-positive women. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: To strengthen support for family planning as HIV prevention, we systematically identified key individuals in the field of international HIV/AIDS-those who could potentially influence the issue-and sought to determine their perceptions of barriers to and facilitators for implementing this PMTCT strategy. We used a criteria-based approach to determine which HIV/AIDS stakeholders have the most significant impact on HIV/AIDS research, programs, funding and policy and stratified purposive sampling to conduct interviews with a subset of these individuals. The interview findings pointed to obstacles to strengthening linkages between family planning and HIV/AIDS, including the need for: resources to integrate family planning and HIV services, infrastructure or capacity to provide integrated services at the facility level, national leadership and coordination, and targeted advocacy to key decision-makers. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The individuals we identified as having regional or international influence in the field of HIV/AIDS have the ability to leverage an increasingly conducive funding environment and a growing evidence base to address the policy, programmatic and operational challenges to integrating family planning with HIV/AIDS. Fostering greater support for implementing contraception for HIV prevention will require the dedication, collaboration and coordination of many such actors. Our findings can inform a targeted advocacy campaign

ФОТОЭЛЕКТРОННЫЕ УМНОЖИТЕЛИ С МНОГОСЛОЙНЫМИ ПЛЕНОЧНЫМИ ЭКРАНАМИ ДЛЯ ЗАЩИТЫ ОТ ВОЗДЕЙСТВИЯ ВНЕШНИХ ПОСТОЯННЫХ МАГНИТНЫХ ПОЛЕЙ

The effectiveness of the screening constant magnetic field is multi-layered film screens system of NiFe/Cu, formed on the cylindrical housing of photomultiplier tubes, and compared with screen-based steel material – brand 80NHS permalloy. It is shown that the most effective is the screen on the basis of the multilayered film screens, which provide shielding effectiveness value 8–10 in magnetic fields with induction of 0,1–1 mT, and 80–100 – in magnetic fields with induction of 2–4 mT , which is 4–5 times higher than for the screen of the material 80NHS.Изучена эффективность экранирования постоянного магнитного поля многослойными пленочными экранами системы NiFe/Cu, сформированными на цилиндрических корпусах фотоэлектронных умножителей, и проведено сопоставление с экраном на основе металлургического материала – пермаллой марки 80НХС. Показано, что наиболее эффективным является экран на основе многослойных пленочных структур, который обеспечивает значения эффективности экранирования 8–10 в магнитных полях с индукцией 0,1–1 мТл, и 80–100 – в магнитных полях с индукцией 2–4 мТл, что в 4–5 раз выше, чем для экрана из материала 80НХС

The SHiP experiment at the proposed CERN SPS Beam Dump Facility

The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has proposed a general-purpose experimental facility operating in beam-dump mode at the CERN SPS accelerator to search for light, feebly interacting particles. In the baseline configuration, the SHiP experiment incorporates two complementary detectors. The upstream detector is designed for recoil signatures of light dark matter (LDM) scattering and for neutrino physics, in particular with tau neutrinos. It consists of a spectrometer magnet housing a layered detector system with high-density LDM/neutrino target plates, emulsion-film technology and electronic high-precision tracking. The total detector target mass amounts to about eight tonnes. The downstream detector system aims at measuring visible decays of feebly interacting particles to both fully reconstructed final states and to partially reconstructed final states with neutrinos, in a nearly background-free environment. The detector consists of a 50 m long decay volume under vacuum followed by a spectrometer and particle identification system with a rectangular acceptance of 5 m in width and 10 m in height. Using the high-intensity beam of 400 GeV protons, the experiment aims at profiting from the 4 x 10(19) protons per year that are currently unexploited at the SPS, over a period of 5-10 years. This allows probing dark photons, dark scalars and pseudo-scalars, and heavy neutral leptons with GeV-scale masses in the direct searches at sensitivities that largely exceed those of existing and projected experiments. The sensitivity to light dark matter through scattering reaches well below the dark matter relic density limits in the range from a few MeV/c(2) up to 100 MeV-scale masses, and it will be possible to study tau neutrino interactions with unprecedented statistics. This paper describes the SHiP experiment baseline setup and the detector systems, together with performance results from prototypes in test beams, as it was prepared for the 2020 Update of the European Strategy for Particle Physics. The expected detector performance from simulation is summarised at the end

Fast simulation of muons produced at the SHiP experiment using generative adversarial networks

This paper presents a fast approach to simulating muons produced in interactions of the SPS proton beams with the target of the SHiP experiment. The SHiP experiment will be able to search for new long-lived particles produced in a 400 GeV/c SPS proton beam dump and which travel distances between fifty metres and tens of kilometers. The SHiP detector needs to operate under ultra-low background conditions and requires large simulated samples of muon induced background processes. Through the use of Generative Adversarial Networks it is possible to emulate the simulation of the interaction of 400 GeV/c proton beams with the SHiP target, an otherwise computationally intensive process. For the simulation requirements of the SHiP experiment, generative networks are capable of approximating the full simulation of the dense fixed target, offering a speed increase by a factor of Script O(106). To evaluate the performance of such an approach, comparisons of the distributions of reconstructed muon momenta in SHiP's spectrometer between samples using the full simulation and samples produced through generative models are presented. The methods discussed in this paper can be generalised and applied to modelling any non-discrete multi-dimensional distribution

The experimental facility for the Search for Hidden Particles at the CERN SPS

The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) logo The International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA) logo The following article is OPEN ACCESS The experimental facility for the Search for Hidden Particles at the CERN SPS C. Ahdida44, R. Albanese14,a, A. Alexandrov14, A. Anokhina39, S. Aoki18, G. Arduini44, E. Atkin38, N. Azorskiy29, J.J. Back54, A. Bagulya32Show full author list Published 25 March 2019 • © 2019 CERN Journal of Instrumentation, Volume 14, March 2019 Download Article PDF References Download PDF 543 Total downloads 7 7 total citations on Dimensions. Article has an altmetric score of 1 Turn on MathJax Share this article Share this content via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Share on Google+ Share on Mendeley Article information Abstract The Search for Hidden Particles (SHiP) Collaboration has shown that the CERN SPS accelerator with its 400 GeV/c proton beam offers a unique opportunity to explore the Hidden Sector [1–3]. The proposed experiment is an intensity frontier experiment which is capable of searching for hidden particles through both visible decays and through scattering signatures from recoil of electrons or nuclei. The high-intensity experimental facility developed by the SHiP Collaboration is based on a number of key features and developments which provide the possibility of probing a large part of the parameter space for a wide range of models with light long-lived super-weakly interacting particles with masses up to Script O(10) GeV/c2 in an environment of extremely clean background conditions. This paper describes the proposal for the experimental facility together with the most important feasibility studies. The paper focuses on the challenging new ideas behind the beam extraction and beam delivery, the proton beam dump, and the suppression of beam-induced background