Effects of Multiple Stacking Faults on the Electronic and Optical Properties of Armchair MoS$$_{}$$ Nanoribbons: First-Principles Calculations

The electronic and optical properties of armchair MoS\(_{2}\) nanoribbons with multiple stacking faults are investigated using first-principles calculations. It’s interesting that the band gaps approach zero for armchair MoS\(_{2}\) nanoribbons with two and four stacking faults. The gaps of armchair MoS\(_{2}\) nanoribbons with one stacking fault and three stacking faults are converged to 0.46 eV and 0.36 eV, respectively, which is smaller than perfect MoS\(_{2}\) nanoribbons. The partial charge density of armchair MoS\(_{2}\) nanoribbons with two stacking faults shows that the defect levels are originated from stacking faults. The frequency-dependent optical response (dielectric function, absorption, reflectance and electron energy loss spectra) is also presented. The optical results of monolayer MoS\(_{2}\) are in agreement with previous study. The peaks in the imaginary part of perfect armchair MoS\(_{2}\) nanoribbons are about 2.8 eV, 4.0 eV and 5.4 eV and the peaks of the imaginary part of armchair MoS\(_{2}\) nanoribbons with stacking faults are mainly 2.8 eV and 5.4 eV. They are independent of ribbon width. The peaks in electron energy loss spectra move toward larger wavelengths (redshift) due to the introduction of stacking faults.     

Cross-Interaction Between Au/Sn and Cu/Sn Interfacial Reactions

The cross-interaction between Sn/Cu and Sn/Au interfacial reactions in an Au/Sn/Cu sandwich structure was studied. Field-emission electron probe microanalysis (FE-EPMA) revealed that the Cu content in the three Au-Sn phases (AuSn, AuSn₂, and AuSn₄) was very low, less than 1 at.%. This means␣that Cu from the opposite Cu foil did not participate in the interfacial reaction at the Sn/Au interface. On the opposite Sn/Cu side, Au-substituted (Cu,Au)₆Sn₅ formed within the initial 1 min of reflow. With prolonged reflow, the Au content in the Au-substituted (Cu,Au)₆Sn₅ increased and it transformed into a Cu-substituted (Au,Cu)Sn phase with 25 at.% Cu after 1 min of reflow at 250°C. The x-ray diffraction (XRD) pattern confirmed the phase transformation of Au-substituted (Cu,Au)₆Sn₅ to Cu-substituted (Au,Cu)Sn phase. In addition, there was greater Au consumption in the Au/Sn/Cu sandwich joint structure than in the single Au/Sn reaction case, due to some of the Au participating in the opposite Sn/Cu interfacial reaction.     

Geometrical Characteristics and Surface Polarity of Inclined Crystallographic Planes of the Wurtzite and Zincblende Structures

Inclined crystallographic planes of the wurtzite structure were investigated in comparison with the zincblende structure in terms of surface geometry characteristics. The ball–stick model indicates that the semipolar surface possesses a surface polarity resembling the anion polarity, which agrees with the common experimental observations of epitaxial growth preference for the cation-polarity surface over the surface. The wurtzite surface was found to share geometrical similarities with the zincblende {100} surface uniquely among the possible semipolar planes. This finding encourages epitaxial growth on the plane of wurtzite semiconductors, e.g., GaN, with the potential of avoiding atomic step formations typically associated with off-axis crystallographic planes.     

Euclidean Geometry LDPC-VBLAST System Design and Performance Evaluation

Among popular multi-transmit and multi-receive antennas techniques, the VBLAST (Vertical Bell Laboratories Layered Space-Time) architecture has been shown to be a good solution for wireless communications applications that require the transmission of data at high rates. Recently, the application of efficient error correction coding schemes such as low density parity-check (LDPC) codes to systems with multi-transmit and multi-receive antennas has shown to significantly improve bit error rate performance. Although irregular LDPC codes with non-structure are quite popular due to the ease of constructing the parity check matrices and their very good error rate performance, the complexity of the encoder is high. Simple implementation of both encoder and decoder can be an asset in wireless communications applications. In this paper, we study the application of Euclidean geometry LDPC codes to the VBLAST system. We assess system performance using different code parameters and different numbers of antennas via Monte-Carlo simulation and show that the combination of Euclidean geometry LDPC codes and VBLAST can significantly improve bit error rate performance. We also show that interleaving data is necessary to improve performance of LDPC codes when a higher number of antennas is, used in order to mitigate the effect of error propagation. The simplicity of the implementation of both encoder and decoder makes Euclidean geometry LDPC codes with VBLAST system attractive and suitable for practical applications.     

Scattering of Electromagnetic Waves by a Coated Nihility Cylinder

An analytical solution for the scattering of electromagnetic plane waves from an infinitely long nihility cylinder, coated with a double positive (DPS), double negative (DNG), epsilon negative (ENG), or mu negative (MNG) layer of uniform thickness is presented. The solution is determined by solving the scalar wave equation in the cylindrical coordinates, for different regions and applying the appropriate boundary conditions at the interfaces. Both TM and TE polarizations as incident plane have been considered in the analysis. Comparison of behaviors of a coated nihility cylinder with a coated PEC cylinder has been made. It is noted that two situations are more closer for DNG coating as compared to DPS coating.     

A pilot-assisted non-Cyclic Prefixed MIMO-SCFDE system

A non-Cyclic Prefixed Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Single-Carrier Frequency-Domain Equalization (non-CP MIMO-SCFDE) system based on a recursive algorithm of Joint Channel Es- timation and Data Detection (recursive-JCEDD) is proposed in this paper. Unlike the traditional CP MIMO-SCFDE system, the transmitted block of the proposed system is designed in the way that block-type pilot sequences and Single-Carrier (SC) information sequences have been arranged alter- nately without any cyclic prefix before each ...     

Theoretical Study of Millimeter Wave Harmonic Oscillator Stabilized with a Transmission Cavity

An equivalent circuit model of millimeter wave second harmonic oscillator stabilized with a transmission cavity has been proposed for constructing analytical formulations between performance parameters of the oscillator and parameters of the circuit. The model consists of an equivalent circuit of fundamental wave and that of second harmonic wave. Each of the circuits comprises circuit models of main cavity, transmission waveguide, and transmission cavity. Absorbing material placed between the transmission waveguide and the transmission cavity can suppress additional resonances originated from transmission cavity. The behavior of the second harmonic oscillator can be effectively described by the circuit model. Furthermore, based on this model, mechanical tuning characteristics have been studied at first, and then analytical formulas for quality factor and efficiency depending on circuit parameters have been derived. The circuit parameters can be conveniently extracted by electromagnetic field simulation. Hence the formulas exhibit both compact form and enough accuracy. Thereafter, general rules of performance parameters varying with circuit parameters have been deduced for the harmonic oscillators. Then some design considerations have been derived according to the corresponding analysis. The equivalent circuit model is useful for designing and adjusting millimeter wave second harmonic stabilizing oscillator with a transmission cavity.     

Design and Simulation of a Wide-Beam High-Power Parabolic Antenna with Dual-Source

For resolving the essential problem that the beam is too narrow in the application of the high-power UWB (Ultra-Wideband) antenna with single-source, a novel wide-beam high-power parabolic antenna with dual-source has been designed, and the edge of the paraboloid was cut in order to reduce the size of the antenna. Radiation properties of this proposed antenna are studied with finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) numerical method. The radiation properties of the proposed antenna can be improved by changing the structure of the parabolic antenna and adjusting the angle between the source and the axis of the antenna. The result shows that the beam-width has been improved significantly under the precondition of maintaining the peak power, and also the size of the antenna was minished by cutting the edge of the paraboloid.     

Thermoelectric Effect Spectroscopy and Photoluminescence of High-Resistivity CdTe:In

Thermoelectric effect spectroscopy and photoluminescence techniques were used to study the defect levels in samples from three crystals of CdTe:In grown by the vertical gradient freeze method. The main goal of the investigation was to study defects, which strongly trap charge carriers or act as recombination centers in order to eliminate them from the technological process. The main difference among detecting and non-detecting samples was the absence of electron traps with a very high capture cross-section and energy 0.6 eV to 0.7 eV, which act as lifetime killers even at low concentrations. Recently published ab initio calculations show a complex of Te antisite and Cd vacancy within this energy range.     

Multiconstrained QoS multipath routing in wireless sensor networks

Sensor nodes are densely deployed to accomplish various applications because of the inexpensive cost and small size. Depending on different applications, the traffic in the wireless sensor networks may be mixed with time-sensitive packets and reliability-demanding packets. Therefore, QoS routing is an important issue in wireless sensor networks. Our goal is to provide soft-QoS to different packets as path information is not readily available in wireless networks. In this paper, we utilize the multiple paths between the source and sink pairs for QoS provisioning. Unlike E2E QoS schemes, soft-QoS mapped into links on a path is provided based on local link state information. By the estimation and approximation of path quality, traditional NP-complete QoS problem can be transformed to a modest problem. The idea is to formulate the optimization problem as a probabilistic programming, then based on some approximation technique, we convert it into a deterministic linear programming, which is much easier and convenient to solve. More importantly, the resulting solution is also one to the original probabilistic programming. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. This work was supported in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation under grant DBI-0529012, the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development Award under grant ANI-0093241 and the Office of Naval Research under Young Investigator Award N000140210464. Xiaoxia Huang received her BS and MS in the Electrical Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2000 and 2002, respectively. She is completing her Ph.D. degree in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Florida. Her research interests include mobile computing, QoS and routing in wireless ad hoc networks and wireless sensor networks. Yuguang Fang received a Ph.D. degree in Systems Engineering from Case Western Reserve University in January 1994 and a Ph.D degree in Electrical Engineering from Boston University in May 1997. He was an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at New Jersey Institute of Technology from July 1998 to May 2000. He then joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Florida in May 2000 as an assistant professor, got an early promotion to an associate professor with tenure in August 2003 and to a full professor in August 2005. He holds a University of Florida Research Foundation (UFRF) Professorship from 2006 to 2009. He has published over 200 papers in refereed professional journals and conferences. He received the National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Award in 2001 and the Office of Naval Research Young Investigator Award in 2002. He has served on several editorial boards of technical journals including IEEE Transactions on Communications, IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing and ACM Wireless Networks. He have also been activitely participating in professional conference organizations such as serving as The Steering Committee Co-Chair for QShine, the Technical Program Vice-Chair for IEEE INFOCOM’2005, Technical Program Symposium Co-Chair for IEEE Globecom’2004, and a member of Technical Program Committee for IEEE INFOCOM (1998, 2000, 2003–2007).