JVST A & B - Editor's Picks

December 2013

Dear Colleague,

Listed below are some Editor's Pick and Most Read articles from JVST A and JVST B. To view a full list of articles, please visit the AVS Publications Website. Click here to sign up for RSS and Table of Contents feeds.

Mechanical and transparent conductive properties of ZnO and Ga-doped ZnO films sputtered using electron-cyclotron-resonance plasma on polyethylene naphtalate substrates

Housei Akazawa

Transparent conductive ZnO and Ga-doped ZnO (GZO) films were deposited on polyethylene naphtalate (PEN) sheet substrates using electron cyclotron resonance plasma sputtering. Both ZnO and GZO films were highly adhesive to the PEN substrates without inserting an intermediate layer in the interface. When compared at the same thickness, the transparent conductive properties of GZO films on PEN substrates were only slightly inferior to those on glass substrates. However, the carrier concentration of ZnO films on PEN substrates was 1.5 times that of those on glass substrates, whereas their Hall mobility was only 60% at a thickness of 300nm. The depth profile of elements measured by secondary ion mass spectroscopy revealed the diffusion of hydrocarbons out of the PEN substrate into the ZnO film. Hence, doped carbons may act as donors to enhance carrier concentration, and the intermixing of elements at the interface may deteriorate the crystallinity, resulting in the lower Hall mobility. When the ZnO films were thicker than 400nm, cracks became prevalent because of the lattice mismatch strain between the film and the substrate, whereas GZO films were free of cracks. The authors investigated how rolling the films around a cylindrical pipe surface affected their conductive properties. Degraded conductivity occurred at a threshold pipe radius of 10 mm when tensile stress was applied to the film, but it occurred at a pipe radius of 5 mm when compressive stress was applied. These values are guidelines for bending actual devices fabricated on PEN substrates. Read More

Editor's Picks

Carbon monoxide-induced reduction and healing of graphene oxides

Badri Narayanan, Stephen L. Weeks, Bhavin N. Jariwala, Bart Macco, Jan-Willem Weber, Somilkumar J. Rathi, Mauritius C. M. van de Sanden, Peter Sutter, Sumit Agarwal and Cristian V. Ciobanu

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 31, 040601 (2013) | Read Online

Molecular dynamics simulation of atomic friction: A review and guide

Yalin Dong, Qunyang Li and Ashlie Martini

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 31, 030801 (2013) | Read Online

High temperature growth of Ag phases on Ge(111)

Cory H. Mullet and Shirley Chiang

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 31, 020602 (2013) | Read Online

Most Read

Plasma etching: Yesterday, today, and tomorrow

Vincent M. Donnelly and Avinoam Kornblit

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 31, 050825 (2013) | Read Online

Surface characterization of nanomaterials and nanoparticles: Important needs and challenging opportunities

Donald R. Baer, Mark H. Engelhard, Grant E. Johnson, Julia Laskin, Jinfeng Lai, Karl Mueller, Prabhakaran Munusamy, Suntharampillai Thevuthasan, Hongfei Wang, Nancy Washton, Alison Elder, Brittany L. Baisch, Ajay Karakoti, Satyanarayana V. N. T. Kuchibhatla, and DaeWon Moon

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 31, 050820 (2013) | Read Online

Atmospheric-pressure low-temperature plasma processes for thin film deposition

Hiroaki Kakiuchi, Hiromasa Ohmi and Kiyoshi Yasutake

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. A 32, 030801 (2014) | Read Online

Picosecond electrical switching of single-gate metal nanotip arrays JVSTB

Soichiro Tsujino and Martin Paraliev

Electrical switching of single-gate all metal field emitter arrays is studied to generate subnanosecond electron pulses. By applying a bipolar current pulse method to the metal nanotip array, electron pulses with the duration down to 210 ps were generated. To explore the short-pulse limit of the proposed switching method, the propagation of the gate potential across the array was analyzed by numerical simulation. The result shows that single-gate field emitter arrays with the array diameter of 1 mm can be electrically switched with the duration down to ~ 5 ps. Read More

Editor's Picks

Bifunctional nanoarrays for probing the immune response at the single-molecule level

Haogang Cai, David Depoil, Matteo Palma, Michael P. Sheetz, Michael L. Dustin and Shalom J. Wind

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 31, 06F902 (2013) | Read Online

Low-temperature plasmas in carbon nanostructure synthesis

Igor Levchenko, Michael Keidar, Shuyan Xu, Holger Kersten and Kostya (Ken) Ostrikov

J. Vac. Sci. Technol. B 31, 050801 (2013) | Read Online

Integrating MBE materials with graphene to induce novel spin-based phenomena

Adrian G. Swartz, Kathleen M. McCreary, Wei Han, Jared J. I. Wong, Patrick M. Odenthal, Hua Wen, Jen-Ru Chen, Roland K. Kawakami, Yufeng Hao, Rodney S. Ruoff and Jaroslav Fabian