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Now showing 1 - 8 of 8
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    Photoluminescence at room temperature of liquid-phase crystallized silicon on glass
    (New York, NY : American Inst. of Physics, 2016) Vetter, Michael; Schwuchow, Anka; Andrä, Gudrun
    The room temperature photoluminescence (PL) spectrum due band-to-band recombination in an only 8 μm thick liquid-phase crystallized silicon on glass solar cell absorber is measured over 3 orders of magnitude with a thin 400 μm thick optical fiber directly coupled to the spectrometer. High PL signal is achieved by the possibility to capture the PL spectrum very near to the silicon surface. The spectra measured within microcrystals of the absorber present the same features as spectra of crystalline silicon wafers without showing defect luminescence indicating the high electronic material quality of the liquid-phase multi-crystalline layer after hydrogen plasma treatment.
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    Chiral Spin Liquid Ground State in YBaCo3FeO7
    (College Park, Md. : APS, 2022) Schweika, W.; Valldor, M.; Reim, J.D.; Rößler, U.K.
    A chiral spin liquid state is discovered in the highly frustrated, noncentrosymmetric swedenborgite compound YBaCo3FeO7, a layered kagome system of hexagonal symmetry, by advanced polarized neutron scattering from a single domain crystalline sample. The observed diffuse magnetic neutron scattering has an antisymmetric property that relates to its specific chirality, which consists of three cycloidal waves perpendicular to the c axis, forming an entity of cylindrical symmetry. Chirality and symmetry agree with relevant antisymmetric exchanges arising from broken spatial parity. Applying a Fourier analysis to the chiral interference pattern, with distinction between kagome sites and the connecting trigonal interlayer sites of threefold symmetry, the chiral spin correlation function is determined. Characteristic chiral waves originate from the trigonal sites and extend over several periods in the kagome planes. The chiral spin liquid is remarkably stable at low temperatures despite strong antiferromagnetic spin exchange. The observation raises a challenge, since the commonly accepted ground states in condensed matter either have crystalline long-range order or form a quantum liquid. We show that, within the classical theory of magnetic order, a disordered ground state may arise from chirality. The present scenario, with antisymmetric exchange acting as a frustrating gauge background that stabilizes local spin lumps, is similar to the avoided phase transition in coupled gauge and matter fields for subnuclear particles.
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    Intercalant-mediated Kitaev exchange in Ag3LiIr2O6
    (College Park, MD : APS, 2022) Yadav, Ravi; Reja, Sahinur; Ray, Rajyavardhan; van den Brink, Jeroen; Nishimoto, Satoshi; Yazyev, Oleg V.
    The recently synthesized Ag3LiIr2O6 has been proposed as a Kitaev magnet in proximity to the quantum spin liquid phase. We explore its microscopic Hamiltonian and magnetic ground state using many-body quantum chemistry methods and exact diagonalization techniques. Our calculations establish a dominant bond dependent ferromagnetic Kitaev exchange between Ir sites and find that the inclusion of Ag 4d orbitals in the configuration interaction calculations strikingly enhances the Kitaev exchange. Furthermore, using exact diagonalization of the nearest-neighbor fully anisotropic J−K−Γ Hamiltonian, we obtain the magnetic phase diagram as a function of further neighbor couplings. We find that the antiferromagnetic off-diagonal coupling stabilizes long range order, but the structure factor calculations suggest that the material is very close to the quantum spin liquid phase and the ordered state can easily collapse into a liquid by small perturbations such as structural distortion or bond disorder.
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    Using the third state of matter: High harmonic generation from liquid targets
    (Bristol : IOP, 2014) Heissler, P.; Lugovoy, E.; Hörlein, R.; Waldecker, L.; Wenz, J.; Heigoldt, M.; Khrennikov, K.; Karsch, S.; Krausz, F.; Abel, B.; Tsakiris, G.D.
    High harmonic generation on solid and gaseous targets has been proven to be a powerful platform for the generation of attosecond pulses. Here we demonstrate a novel technique for the XUV generation on a smooth liquid surface target in vacuum, which circumvents the problem of low repetition rate and limited shot numbers associated with solid targets, while it maintains some of its merits. We employed atomically smooth, continuous liquid jets of water, aqueous salt solutions and ethanol that allow uninterrupted high harmonic generation due to the coherent wake emission mechanism for over 8 h. It has been found that the mechanism of plasma generation is very similar to that for smooth solid target surfaces. The vapor pressure around the liquid target in our setup has been found to be very low such that the presence of the gas phase around the liquid jet could be neglected.
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    Nanoscopic interactions of colloidal particles can suppress millimetre drop splashing
    (London : Royal Soc. of Chemistry, 2021) Thoraval, Marie-Jean; Schubert, Jonas; Karpitschka, Stefan; Chanana, Munish; Boyer, François; Sandoval-Naval, Enrique; Dijksman, J. Frits; Snoeijer, Jacco H.; Lohse, Detlef
    The splashing of liquid drops onto a solid surface is important for a wide range of applications, including combustion and spray coating. As the drop hits the solid surface, the liquid is ejected into a thin horizontal sheet expanding radially over the substrate. Above a critical impact velocity, the liquid sheet is forced to separate from the solid surface by the ambient air, and breaks up into smaller droplets. Despite many applications involving complex fluids, their effects on splashing remain mostly unexplored. Here we show that the splashing of a nanoparticle dispersion can be suppressed at higher impact velocities by the interactions of the nanoparticles with the solid surface. Although the dispersion drop first shows the classical transition from deposition to splashing when increasing the impact velocity, no splashing is observed above a second higher critical impact velocity. This result goes against the commonly accepted understanding of splashing, that a higher impact velocity should lead to even more pronounced splashing. Our findings open new possibilities to deposit large amount of complex liquids at high speeds.
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    A liquid flatjet system for solution phase soft-x-ray spectroscopy
    (Melville, NY : AIP Publishing LLC, 2015) Ekimova, Maria; Quevedo, Wilson; Faubel, Manfred; Wernet, Philippe; Nibbering, Erik T. J.
    We present a liquid flatjet system for solution phase soft-x-ray spectroscopy. The flatjet set-up utilises the phenomenon of formation of stable liquid sheets upon collision of two identical laminar jets. Colliding the two single water jets, coming out of the nozzles with 50 μm orifices, under an impact angle of 48° leads to double sheet formation, of which the first sheet is 4.6 mm long and 1.0 mm wide. The liquid flatjet operates fully functional under vacuum conditions (<10(-3) mbar), allowing soft-x-ray spectroscopy of aqueous solutions in transmission mode. We analyse the liquid water flatjet thickness under atmospheric pressure using interferomeric or mid-infrared transmission measurements and under vacuum conditions by measuring the absorbance of the O K-edge of water in transmission, and comparing our results with previously published data obtained with standing cells with Si3N4 membrane windows. The thickness of the first liquid sheet is found to vary between 1.4-3 μm, depending on the transverse and longitudinal position in the liquid sheet. We observe that the derived thickness is of similar magnitude under 1 bar and under vacuum conditions. A catcher unit facilitates the recycling of the solutions, allowing measurements on small sample volumes (∼10 ml). We demonstrate the applicability of this approach by presenting measurements on the N K-edge of aqueous NH4 (+). Our results suggest the high potential of using liquid flatjets in steady-state and time-resolved studies in the soft-x-ray regime.
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    The Bend+Libration Combination Band Is an Intrinsic, Collective, and Strongly Solute-Dependent Reporter on the Hydrogen Bonding Network of Liquid Water
    (Washington, DC : Americal Chemical Society, 2017) Verma, Pramod Kumar; Kundu, Achintya; Puretz, Matthew S.; Dhoonmoon, Charvanaa; Chegwidden, Oriana S.; Londergan, Casey H.; Cho, Minhaeng
    Water is an extensively self-associated liquid due to its extensive hydrogen bond (H-bond) forming ability. The resulting H-bonded network fluid exhibits nearly continuous absorption of light from the terahertz to the near-IR region. The relatively weak bend+libration water combination band (centered at 2130 cm-1) has been largely overlooked as a reporter of liquid water's structure and dynamics despite its location in a convenient region of the IR for spectroscopic study. The intermolecular nature of the combination band leads to a unique absorption signal that reports collectively on the rigidity of the H-bonding network in the presence of many different solutes. This study reports comprehensively how the combination band acts as an intrinsic and collective probe in various chemically and biologically relevant solutions, including salts of varying character, denaturants, osmolytes, crowders, and surfactants that form reverse micelles and micelles. While we remark on changes in the line width and intensity of this combination band, we mainly focus on the frequency and how the frequency reports on the collective H-bonding network of liquid water. We also comment on the "association band" moniker often applied to this band and how to evaluate discrete features in this spectral region that sometimes appear in the IR spectra of specific kinds of aqueous samples of organic solutes, especially those with very high solute concentrations, with the conclusion that most of these discrete spectral features come exclusively from the solutes and do not report on the water. Contrasts are drawn throughout this work between the collective and delocalized reporting ability of the combination band and the response of more site-specific vibrations like the much-investigated OD stretch of HDO in H2O: the combination band is a unique reporter of H-bonding structure and dynamics and fundamentally different than any local mode probe. Since this band appears as the spectroscopic "background" for many local-mode reporter groups, we note the possibility of observing both local and collective solvent dynamics at the same time in this spectral region.
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    Electron microscopy of nanoparticle superlattice formation at a solid-liquid interface in nonpolar liquids
    (Washington, DC : American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2020) Cepeda-Perez, E.; Doblas, D.; Kraus, T.; de Jonge, N.
    Nanoparticle superlattice films form at the solid-liquid interface and are important for mesoscale materials, but are notoriously difficult to analyze before they are fully dried. Here, the early stages of nanoparticle assembly were studied at solid-liquid interfaces using liquid-phase electron microscopy. Oleylamine-stabilized gold nanoparticles spontaneously formed thin layers on a silicon nitride (SiN) membrane window of the liquid enclosure. Dense packings of hexagonal symmetry were obtained for the first monolayer independent of the nonpolar solvent type. The second layer, however, exhibited geometries ranging from dense packing in a hexagonal honeycomb structure to quasi-crystalline particle arrangements depending on the dielectric constant of the liquid. The complex structures formed by the weaker interactions in the second particle layer were preserved, while the surface remained immersed in liquid. Fine-tuning the properties of the involved materials can thus be used to control the three-dimensional geometry of a superlattice including quasi-crystals.