Enhanced Electron Mobility Due to Dopant‐Defect Pairing in Conductive ZnMgO

The increase of the band gap in Zn_1‐xMg_xO alloys with added Mg facilitates tunable control of the conduction band alignment and the Fermi‐level position in oxide‐heterostructures. However, the maximal conductivity achievable by doping decreases considerably at higher Mg compositions, which limits practical application as a wide‐gap transparent conductive oxide. In this work, first‐principles calculations and material synthesis and characterization are combined to show that the leading cause of the conductivity decrease is the increased formation of acceptor‐like compensating intrinsic defects, such as zinc vacancies (V_Zn), which reduce the free electron concentration and decrease the mobility through ionized impurity scattering. Following the expectation that non‐equilibrium deposition techniques should create a more random distribution of oppositely charged dopants and defects compared to the thermodynamic limit, the paring between dopant Ga_Zn and intrinsic defects V_Zn is studied as a means to reduce the ionized impurity scattering. Indeed, the post‐deposition annealing of Ga‐doped Zn_0.7Mg_0.3O films grown by pulsed laser deposition increases the mobility by 50% resulting in a conductivity as high as σ = 475 S cm^‐1.     

Organic Light‐Emitting Diode Sensing Platform: Challenges and Solutions

The organic light‐emitting diode (OLED)‐based sensing platform is gaining momentum due to unique attributes of the compact OLEDs that are used as excitation sources. This paper, however, points to issues related to this sensing platform that will affect many (bio)chemical sensing applications, in particular in photoluminescence (PL)‐based sensors operated in the advantageous time domain, where pulsed OLEDs are utilized. The issues are related to the post‐pulse electroluminescence (EL) profile, i.e., transient EL, which depends on the OLED materials and structure, and to the long‐wavelength tail of the typically broad‐band EL spectrum. Depending on materials and device structure, the transient EL may exhibit spikes peaking at ～100–200 ns and μs‐long tails. As shown, these interfere with the determination of PL decay times (that are related to analyte concentrations) of sensing elements. The results also indicate that the long‐wavelength tail of the EL spectrum contributes to the interfering post‐pulse μs‐long EL tail. Hence, it is shown that the choice of OLED materials, the use of microcavity (μC) OLEDs with tunable, narrower EL bands, and the use of UV OLEDs alleviate these issues, resulting in more reliable data analysis. Furthermore, a 2‐D uniform 2 μm‐pitch microlens array that was previously used for improving light extraction from the OLEDs (J.‐M. Park et al., Optics Express 2011 , 19, A786) is used for directional PL scattering toward the photodetector, which leads to a ～2.1–3.8 fold enhancement of the PL signal. This behavior is shown for oxygen sensing, which is the basis for sensing of bioanalytes such as glucose, lactate, ethanol, cholesterol, and uric acid.     

Perceptive admission control for wireless network quality of service

As wireless networks become more widely used, there is a growing need to support advanced services, such as multimedia streaming and voice over IP. Traditional approaches to guarantee quality of service (QoS) work well only with predictable channel and network access. In wireless mobile networks, where conditions dynamically change as nodes move about the network, a stateless, high level approach is required. Since shared wireless resources are easily over-utilized, the load in the network must be controlled so that an acceptable QoS for real-time applications can be maintained. If minimum real-time requirements are not met, these unusable packets waste scarce bandwidth and hinder other traffic, compounding the problem. To enable high QoS for all admitted traffic, we propose the Perceptive Admission Control (PAC) protocol. PAC monitors the wireless channel and dynamically adapts admission control decisions to enable high network utilization while preventing congestion. Through discussion, simulations and testbed experiments, we demonstrate that PAC ensures low packet loss and delay for all admitted flows.     

Nanofabrication of 1-D photonic bandgap structures along a photonic wire

A strongly-guided one-dimensional (1-D) waveguide called a photonic wire has high spontaneous emission coupling efficiency, enabling one to realize low-threshold lasers. Combined with the use of 1-D photonic bandgap structures consisting of arrays of holes etched within the photonic wire, novel microcavity lasers can be realized. We report the nanofabrication of a photonic bandgap structure for 1.5 /spl mu/m wavelength along a InGaAsP photonic wire, and discuss numerical simulations for its electrodynamics.     

Plasma-assisted co-evaporation of β-indium sulfide thin films

This paper describes the development of plasma-assisted co-evaporation (PACE) for the formation of β-In₂S₃ thin films. Indium was supplied by conventional thermal evaporation, while the chalcogen gas precursor (H₂S) was activated using an inductively coupled plasma (ICP) source. Using a combination of optical emission spectroscopy and mass spectrometry it was shown that the ICP effectively dissociated H₂S, producing atomic sulfur. Transport modeling was used to quantify the flux distributions of the co-evaporated metal and the plasma-generated species impinging the substrate. Model predictions were validated by measurements of deposition rate and film properties. Substantial improvements in both materials utilization and substrate temperature reduction were realized with respect to conventional co-evaporation. β-In₂S₃ was formed as low as 100 °C and it was observed that quality was a strong function of S/In ratio. The grain size decreased and the optical band gap increased as the substrate temperature was reduced.     

Development of a new solar thermal engine system for circulating water for aeration

This paper presents a numerical study about the performance of a Beta Stirling solar thermal engine system. This system is composed of a solar collector box connected to a regenerator hydraulic system and a transmitting power system. The objective of the system is to offer a new alternative to help solving stagnant water pollution in hot countries like Thailand by circulating water in canals, lakes, ponds etc. for aeration using solar energy.The purpose of this study is to determine the power output and actual heat transfer on the performance of the solar thermal engine. The solar thermal engine is analyzed using a mathematical model based on the first law of thermodynamics for processes with finite speed, with particular attention to the energy balance at the receiver. The result of calculations showed that the regenerator volume and phase angle must be chosen carefully to fulfill the requirement that total fluid mass in the system is constant and to obtain maximum power output throughout the day.     

Piezoelectricity of the Transmembrane Protein ba3 Cytochrome c Oxidase

Controlling the electromechanical response of piezoelectric biological structures including tissues, peptides, and amino acids provides new applications for biocompatible, sustainable materials in electronics and medicine. Here, the piezoelectric effect is revealed in another class of biological materials, with robust longitudinal and shear piezoelectricity measured in single crystals of the transmembrane protein ba₃ cytochrome c oxidase from Thermus thermophilus. The experimental findings from piezoresponse force microscopy are substantiated using a range of control measurements and molecular models. The observed longitudinal and shear piezoelectric responses of ≈ 2 and 8 pm V⁻¹, respectively, are comparable to or exceed the performance of commonly used inorganic piezoelectric materials including quartz, aluminum nitride, and zinc oxide. This suggests that transmembrane proteins may provide, in addition to physiological energy transduction, technologically useful piezoelectric material derived entirely from nature. Membrane proteins could extend the range of rationally designed biopiezoelectric materials far beyond the minimalistic peptide motifs currently used in miniaturized energy harvesters, and the finding of robust piezoelectric response in a transmembrane protein also raises fundamental questions regarding the molecular evolution, activation, and role of regulatory proteins in the cellular nanomachinery, indicating that piezoelectricity might be important for fundamental physiological processes.     

Structured Parallel Architecture for Displacement MIMO Kalman Equalizer in CDMA Systems

A reduced complexity MIMO Kalman equalizer architecture is proposed in this brief by jointly considering the displacement structure and the block-Toeplitz structure. Numerical matrix-matrix multiplications with O(F³) complexity are eliminated by simple data loading process, where F is the spreading factor. Finally, an iterative Conjugate-Gradient based algorithm is proposed to avoid the inverse of the Hermitian symmetric innovation covariance matrix in Kalman gain processor. The proposed architecture not only reduces the numerical complexity from O(F²) to O(Flog₂F) per chip, but also facilitates the parallel and pipelined VLSI implementation in real-time processing