This thesis focuses on the growth of a new type of two-dimensional (2D) material known as hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) using chemical vapor deposition (CVD). It also presents several significant breakthroughs in the authors' understanding of the growth mechanism and development of new growth techniques, which are now well known in the field. Of particular importance is the pioneering work showing experimental proof that 2D crystals of h-BN can indeed be hexagonal in shape. This came as a major surprise to many working in the 2D field, as it had been generally assumed that hexagonal-shaped h-BN was impossible due to energy dynamics. Beyond growth, the thesis also reports on synthesis techniques that are geared toward commercial applications. Large-area aligned growth and up to an eightfold reduction in the cost of h-BN production are demonstrated. At present, all other 2D materials generally use h-BN as their dielectric layer and for encapsulation. As such, this thesis lays the cornerstone for using CVD 2D h-BN for this purpose.

The orientation and physical context of the CMT Series of Workshops have always been cross-disciplinary, but with an emphasis placed on the common concerns of theorists applying many-particle concepts in diverse areas of physics. In this spirit, CMT33 chose to focus special attention on exotic fermionic and bosonic systems, quantum magnets and their quantum and thermal phase transitions, novel condensed matter systems for renewable energy sources, the physics of nanosystems and nanotechnology, and applications of molecular dynamics and density functional theory.

This unique book aims to expose the reader to a wide range of phenomena occurring when soft matter systems are put under the influence of an external electric field. The book shows how an electric field can be used to affect objects at the submicron scale, and how it controls the phase behavior of liquids and polymers. The main focus is on the basic underlying mechanisms. Some technological applications are dealt with as well.

Book chapters are arranged in a logical order, from "simple" systems to more complicated ones. In addition, each topic is covered by the mixed bag of theory, experiment and simulation; and this will give the reader a broad perspective of the underlying physical phenomena.

This book presents a comprehensive review of a diverse range of subjects in physics written by physicists who have all been taught by or are associated with K C Hines. Ken Hines was one great mentor with far-reaching influence on his students who later went on to make outstanding contributions to physics in their careers. The papers provide significant insights into statistical physics, plasma physics from fluorescent lighting to quantum pair plasmas, cosmic ray physics, nuclear reactions, and many other fields.

Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) generators have been actively developed as a new device for medical treatment. The applications of plasma treatment include 1) disinfection, sterilization, and decontamination, which inactivates or kills bacteria, fungi, viruses and spores; 2) bleeding control, which coagulates blood swiftly; 3) wound healing, which shortens the healing period and benefits the regeneration of the epithelization of tissue to avoid scar formation; etc.Biomedical applications of CAPs are explored via either in-vitro assays, or in-vivo tests using pigs as animal models; tests include sterilization of oral pathogens and biofilm, decontamination of biological warfare agent, blood clotting and rapid control of active life-threatening hemorrhage, and post-operative observation of wound healing after plasma treatment. The conventional approaches in each application are first introduced, then the advantages of plasma treatments are discussed and demonstrated by the test results. The mechanisms of CAPs' biocidal effect, blood clotting effect, and wound healing effect are presented and discussed.

Birefringent Thin Films and Polarizing Elements (2nd Edition) includes the significant advances that have been made since the first book on tilted-columnar films was published. The major discovery of serial bideposition has led to a normal-columnar nanostructure with enhanced birefringence and in turn to nanoengineered handed films with properties matching the left-circular reflectors of scarab beetles. A second version of the Matlab software that accompanies the book includes algorithms for computing material, electromagnetic and optical properties of isotropic, birefringent and chiral films. A set of numerical and experimental examples chosen to illustrate and generate interest in these new fields will be of interest to graduate students and to researchers in optics.

This book covers the crucial aspects of theoretical and experimental approaches for Si-based spintronic materials. The theory parts emphasize on two first-principles methods - the GW method to improve the insulating gaps of the half metals which are a class of materials ideal for spintronic applications, and the linear response theory to calculate electric and magnetic susceptibilities. Three growth methods for doping transition metal elements in alloy and layered forms in Si will be focused on. Also three methods for characterization will be presented emphasizing on how to interpret experimental results. Finally, recent progress made in the Si-based spintronic materials will be discussed. This book is intended for researchers and graduate students who are interested in designing and growing new spintronic materials, in particular, silicon-based.

These lecture notes provide a detailed treatment of the thermal energy storage and transport by conduction in natural and fabricated structures. Thermal energy in two carriers, i.e. phonons and electrons - are explored from first principles. For solid-state transport, a common Landauer framework is used for heat flow. Issues including the quantum of thermal conductance, ballistic interface resistance, and carrier scattering are elucidated. Bulk material properties, such as thermal and electrical conductivity, are derived from particle transport theories, and the effects of spatial confinement on these properties are established.

These lecture notes provide a detailed treatment of the thermal energy storage and transport by conduction in natural and fabricated structures. Thermal energy in two carriers, i.e. phonons and electrons - are explored from first principles. For solid-state transport, a common Landauer framework is used for heat flow. Issues including the quantum of thermal conductance, ballistic interface resistance, and carrier scattering are elucidated. Bulk material properties, such as thermal and electrical conductivity, are derived from particle transport theories, and the effects of spatial confinement on these properties are established.

Elastic waves possess some remarkable properties and it is these that explain their important role in the processing of electronic signals and the sensing of physical quantities. For example, they can be generated by localized or distributed sources, can propagate in the core or on the surface of optically transparent or opaque solids, have velocities one hundred thousand times less than those of electromagnetic waves, and they can modify the characteristics of a light beam. The purpose of this second volume is to illustrate the functions fulfilled by the free and guided waves described in Vol. I. It deals with the generation of bulk waves using piezoelectric resonators, generation of surface waves by interdigital transducers, interaction between elastic waves and light waves, acousto-electronic filters, acousto-optic components, sensors and instruments.

Soft matter is a concept which covers polymers, liquid crystals, colloids, amphiphilic molecules, glasses, granular and biological materials. One of the fundamental characteristic features of soft matter is that it exhibits various mesoscopic structures originating from a large number of internal degrees of freedom of each molecule. Due to such intermediate structures, soft matter can easily be brought into non-equilibrium states and cause non-linear responses by imposing external fields such as an electric field, a mechanical stress or a shear flow. Volume 4 of the series in Soft Condensed Matter focuses on the non-linear and non-equilibrium properties of soft matter. It contains a collection of review articles on the current topics of non-equilibrium soft matter physics written by leading experts in the field. The topics dealt with in this volume includes rheology of polymers and liquid crystals, dynamical properties of Langmuir monolayers at the air/water interface, hydrodynamics of membranes and twisted filaments as well as dynamics of deformable self-propelled particles and migration of biological cells. This book serves both as an introduction to students as well as a useful reference to researchers.

Written by an experimentalist famous for his discovery of stishovite, with vast experience in phase transition studies, this book is devoted to a description of the continuous and discontinuous phase transitions. It includes chapters outlining the Van der Waals model, hard sphere and soft sphere models of melting, scaling phenomena, renormgroup approach to phase transitions, and experimental examples to illustrate various phase transitions.Unlike conventional books covering the same topic, this is meant for undergraduate students and experimentalists to understand basic concepts in the physics of phase transitions.

This book provides a new understanding of the large amount of experimental results gained in solid state physics during the last seven decades. For more than 160 different materials, data analyses shown in terms of atomistic models (Hamiltonians) have not provided a quantitatively satisfactory description of either excitation spectra or dynamic properties. Instead, the experimental evidences have elaborated that field theories are necessary. However, most experimentalists are not familiar with field theories, and realistic field theories of magnetism are absent.The book illustrates in an empirical way the elements of future field theories of solid state physics with special emphasis on magnetic materials. In contrast to the many available textbooks on quantum field theories that emphasize more on algorithmic formalities rather than referring to the experimental facts, the approach in this book is pragmatic instead of abstract theoretic. This methodical concept considerably facilitates experimentalists to get acquainted with the basic ideas of field theories, even if a ready field theory is not provided by this experimental study. remove

The importance of the effective mass (EM) is already well known since the inception of solid-state physics and this first-of-its-kind monograph solely deals with the quantum effects in EM of heavily doped (HD) nanostructures. The materials considered are HD quantum confined nonlinear optical, III-V, II-VI, IV-VI, GaP, Ge, PtSb2, stressed materials, GaSb, Te, II-V, Bi2Te3, lead germanium telluride, zinc and cadmium diphosphides, and quantum confined III-V, II-VI, IV-VI, and HgTe/CdTe super-lattices with graded interfaces and effective mass super-lattices. The presence of intense light waves in optoelectronics and strong electric field in nano-devices change the band structure of semiconductors in fundamental ways, which have also been incorporated in the study of EM in HD quantized structures of optoelectronic compounds that control the studies of the HD quantum effect devices under strong fields. The importance of measurement of band gap in optoelectronic materials under intense external fields has also been discussed in this context. The influences of magnetic quantization, crossed electric and quantizing fields, electric field and light waves on the EM in HD semiconductors and super-lattices are discussed.The content of this book finds twenty-eight different applications in the arena of nano-science and nano-technology. This book contains 200 open research problems which form the integral part of the text and are useful for both PhD aspirants and researchers in the fields of condensed matter physics, materials science, solid state sciences, nano-science and technology and allied fields in addition to the graduate courses in semiconductor nanostructures. The book is written for post-graduate students, researchers, engineers and professionals in the fields of condensed matter physics, solid state sciences, materials science, nanoscience and technology and nanostructured materials in general.

This book presents, in the form of reviews by world's leading physicists in wide-ranging fields in theoretical physics, the influence and prescience of Skyrme's daring idea of 1960, originally conceived for nuclear physics, that fermions can arise from bosons via topological solitons, pervasively playing a powerful role in wide-ranging areas of physics, from nuclear/astrophysics, to particle physics, to string theory and to condensed matter physics.The skyrmion description, both from gauge theory and from gauge/gravity duality, offers solutions to some long-standing and extremely difficult problems at high baryonic density, inaccessible by QCD proper. It also offers explanations and makes startling predictions for fascinating new phenomena in condensed matter systems. In both cases, what is at the core is the topology although the phenomena are drastically different, even involving different spacetime dimensions.This second edition has been expanded with addition of new reviews and extensively updated to take into account the latest developments in the field.

This graduate level textbook develops the theory of magnetically confined plasma, with the aim of bringing the reader to the level of current research in the field of thermonuclear fusion. It begins with the basic concepts of magnetic field description, plasma equilibria and stability, and goes on to derive the equations for guiding center particle motion in an equilibrium field. Topics include linear and nonlinear ideal and resistive modes and particle transport. It is of use to workers in the field of fusion both for its wide-ranging account of tokamak physics and as a kind of handbook or formulary. This edition has been extended in a number of ways. The material on mode-particle interactions has been reformulated and much new information added, including methodology for Monte Carlo implementation of mode destabilization. These results give explicit means of carrying out mode destabilization analysis, in particular for the dangerous fishbone mode. A new chapter on cyclotron motion in toroidal geometry has been added, with comparisons of the analysis of resonances using guiding center results.A new chapter on the use of lithium lined walls has been added, a promising means of lowering the complexity and cost of full scale fusion reactors. A section on nonlocal transport has been added, including an analysis of Levy flight simulations of ion transport in the reversed field pinch in Padova, RFX.

The author of this unique volume, Lev P Gor'kov is internationally renowned for his seminal contribution in the fundamentals of the Theory of Superconductivity, Theory of Metals, the field of Quantum Statistical Physics, and more generally, Organic Metals and the like. Each reprints' group is preceded by the author's introductions and commentaries clarifying the formulation of a problem, summarizing the essence of the results and placing them in the context of recent developments. The author belongs to the last generation of scientists who were the direct disciples of the legendary Russian theorist Lev Landau. And Gor'kov's achievements reflect the unique style and the originality of this famous Scientific School. As with other Russian scientists of his generation, many of the pioneering papers by Lev Gor'kov have been published in the Russian journals that are hard-to-reach for modern readers, students and postdocs. Allowing readers a glimpse into the various ways that the field of condensed matter physics was evolving for more than half a century, the volume is a valuable source for historians of science.

The book intends to give a state-of-the-art overview of flexoelectricity, a linear physical coupling between mechanical (orientational) deformations and electric polarization, which is specific to systems with orientational order, such as liquid crystals.Chapters written by experts in the field shed light on theoretical as well as experimental aspects of research carried out since the discovery of flexoelectricity. Besides a common macroscopic (continuum) description the microscopic theory of flexoelectricity is also addressed. Electro-optic effects due to or modified by flexoelectricity as well as various (direct and indirect) measurement methods are discussed. Special emphasis is given to the role of flexoelectricity in pattern-forming instabilities.While the main focus of the book lies in flexoelectricity in nematic liquid crystals, peculiarities of other mesophases (bent-core systems, cholesterics, and smectics) are also reviewed. Flexoelectricity has relevance to biological (living) systems and can also offer possibilities for technical applications. The basics of these two interdisciplinary fields are also summarized.

Nonadiabatic transition is a highly multidisciplinary concept and phenomenon, constituting a fundamental mechanism of state and phase changes in various dynamical processes of physics, chemistry and biology, such as molecular dynamics, energy relaxation, chemical reaction, and electron and proton transfer. Control of molecular processes by laser fields is also an example of time-dependent nonadiabatic transition.In this new edition, the original chapters are updated to facilitate enhanced understanding of the concept and applications. Three new chapters - comprehension of nonadiabatic chemical dynamics, control of chemical dynamics, and manifestation of molecular functions - are also added.

This book contains advanced subjects in solid state physics with emphasis on the theoretical exposition of various physical phenomena in solids using quantum theory, hence entitled "A modern course in the quantum theory of solids". The use of the adjective "modern" in the title is to reflect the fact that some of the new developments in condensed matter physics have been included in the book. The new developments contained in the book are mainly in experimental methods (inelastic neutron scattering and photoemission spectroscopy), in magnetic properties of solids (the itinerant magnetism, the superexchange, the Hubbard model, and giant and colossal magnetoresistance), and in optical properties of solids (Raman scattering). Besides the new developments, the Green's function method used in many-body physics and the strong-coupling theory of superconductivity are also expounded in great detail.

This book provides a detailed overview of the plasma fluidized bed. It is an innovative tool and generally combines plasma process with another efficient reactor, fluidized bed, providing an excellent method for particulate processes over conventional technology. The development and designs of typical types of plasma fluidized beds, mainly thermal plasma fluidized beds and non-thermal plasma fluidized beds are discussed. The influencing factors on the performance of plasma fluidized beds are analyzed in detail. The mechanism, i.e. the discharge characteristics, hydrodynamics, heat transfer and mass transfer are analyzed to offer a further insight of plasma fluidized beds. Applications of plasma fluidized beds for different areas, including metallurgy extraction, green energy process, environmental protection and advanced materials are presented. The book is a valuable reference for scientists, engineers and graduate students in chemical engineering and relative fields.

This book provides a practical approach to consolidate one's acquired knowledge or to learn new concepts in solid state physics through solving problems. It contains 300 problems on various subjects of solid state physics. The problems in this book can be used as homework assignments in an introductory or advanced course on solid state physics for undergraduate or graduate students.

It can also serve as a desirable reference book to solve typical problems and grasp mathematical techniques in solid state physics. In practice, it is regarded fascinating and rewarding to learn a new idea or technique through solving a real challenging problem than through reading only. In this aspect, this book is not a plain collection of problems but it presents a large number of problem-solving ideas and procedures, some of which are valuable to practitioners in condensed matter physics.

This book traces the history of ideas about the nature of matter and also the way that mankind has used material resources that the world offers. Starting with the ideas of ancient civilizations that air, earth, fire and water were the basic ingredients of all matter, it traces the development of the science of chemistry beginning within the ranks of the alchemists. First, the idea of elements grew and then the atomic nature of matter was verified. Physicists had entered the scene, showing the nature of atoms in terms of fundamental particles and then introducing the concept of wave-particle duality that altered the basic concepts of what matter was. Finally the physicists discovered a panoply of fundamental particles, some observed within atom-smashing machines and the existence of others merely postulated. In parallel with the above there is a description of various kinds of matter as it affects everyday life, including the nature of matter associated with life itself. The way that early man used the materials directly given by nature, such as stone, wood and animal skins, is followed by the use of materials requiring some process to be employed, e.g. metals which include bronze and also concrete. Some important modern materials are discussed, such as synthetic fibres and plastics and semiconductors, and potentially important future products from new developments in nanotechnology.

At present, there is an increasing interest in the prediction of properties of classical and new materials such as substitutional alloys, their surfaces, and metallic or semiconductor multilayers. A detailed understanding based on a thus of the utmost importance for fu- microscopic, parameter-free approach is ture developments in solid state physics and materials science. The interrela- tion between electronic and structural properties at surfaces plays a key role for a microscopic understanding of phenomena as diverse as catalysis, corrosion, chemisorption and crystal growth. Remarkable progress has been made in the past 10-15 years in the understand- ing of behavior of ideal crystals and their surfaces by relating their properties to the underlying electronic structure as determined from the first principles. Similar studies of complex systems like imperfect surfaces, interfaces, and mul- tilayered structures seem to be accessible by now. Conventional band-structure methods, however, are of limited use because they require an excessive number of atoms per elementary cell, and are not able to account fully for e.g. substitu- tional disorder and the true semiinfinite geometry of surfaces. Such problems can be solved more appropriately by Green function techniques and multiple scattering formalism.