Nanoscience and Nanotechnology Commons^™

Epitaxial Growth Of Si-Ge-Sn Alloys For Optoelectronic Device Application, Aboozar Mosleh

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Microelectronics industry has experienced a tremendous change over the last few decades and has shown that Moore’s law has been followed by doubling the number of transistors on the chip every 18 months. However, continuous scaling down of the transistors size is reaching the physical limits and data transfer through metal interconnects will not be able to catch up with the increasing data processing speed in the future. Therefore, optical data transfer between chips and on-chip has been widely investigated. Silicon based optoelectronics has received phenomenal attention since Si has been the core material on which microelectronic industry has been …

Broadband High Efficiency Fractal-Like And Diverse Geometry Silicon Nanowire Arrays For Photovoltaic Applications, Omar Hassan Al-Zoubi

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Solar energy has many advantages over conventional sources of energy. It is abundant, clean and sustainable. One way to convert solar energy directly into electrical energy is by using the photovoltaic solar cells (PVSC). Despite PVSC are becoming economically competitive, they still have high cost and low light to electricity conversion efficiency. Therefore, increasing the efficiency and reducing the cost are key elements for producing economically more competitive PVSC that would have significant impact on energy market and saving environment. A significant percentage of the PVSC cost is due to the materials cost. For that, thin films PVSC have been …

Fabrication Of Sub-10 Nm Metallic Structures Via Nanomasking Technique For Plasmonic Enhancement Applications, Stephen Joseph Bauman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

One area of nanoscience that has become popular in recent years is the study of optics at the nanoscale. Due to enhanced fabrication techniques, new geometries and improved dimensional resolutions have been allowing the creation of nanostructures for use in this area. Nanoscale geometries cause unique optical effects such as enhancement of the signal’s electric field strength at the surface of a substrate. Specifically, structures separated by nanogaps (10 nm and smaller) have been shown to exhibit strong field enhancement within the gaps. This has opened up the potential for surface enhanced spectroscopies, enhanced absorption for photovoltaics, and improved sensing …

Large-Scale Graphene Film Deposition For Monolithic Device Fabrication, Khaled Al-Shurman

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Since 1958, the concept of integrated circuit (IC) has achieved great technological developments and helped in shrinking electronic devices. Nowadays, an IC consists of more than a million of compacted transistors.

The majority of current ICs use silicon as a semiconductor material. According to Moore's law, the number of transistors built-in on a microchip can be double every two years. However, silicon device manufacturing reaches its physical limits. To explain, there is a new trend to shrinking circuitry to seven nanometers where a lot of unknown quantum effects such as tunneling effect can not be controlled. Hence, there is an …