Modern Physics Letters B

Scanning photocurrent microscopy (SPCM) is a powerful experimental tool used to investigate spatially resolved optoelectronic properties of semiconductors and their nanostructures. Raster-scanned laser excitation generates a position-dependent photocurrent map from which carrier diffusion length, electric field distribution, doping concentration and more can be explored. In this review, we will briefly discuss the history of the technique, the theory behind locally injected carrier transport in semiconductors, the SPCM experimental setup, and recent applications of SPCM in semiconductor nanostructures. Particularly, we have shown that the minority carrier diffusion length can also be obtained by SPCM in two-dimensional semiconductors and that the local excitation can result in an internal electric field because of the difference in electron and hole mobilities.

In this paper, we fully describe the geometry of atomic structure of carbon nanotube with quinoid structure. Electronic energy band structure of carbon nanotubes with quinoid structure is studied by tight-binding approximation. In the presence of bond alternation, calculations show that only armchair (n, n) carbon nanotube (without twisting) remains metallic and zigzag (3ν - 1, -3ν + 1) CNT becomes metallic at the critical elongation. Effect of deformation on the change of band gap is also calculated and discussed.

A simple theoretical model is developed to study the effect of size and temperature on the coefficient of thermal expansion and lattice parameter of nanomaterials. We have studied the size dependence of thermal expansion coefficient of Pb, Ag and Zn in different shape viz. spherical, nanowire and nanofilm. A good agreement between theory and available experimental data confirmed the model predictions. We have used these results to study the temperature dependence of lattice parameter for different size and also included the results of bulk materials. The temperature dependence of lattice parameter of Zn nanowire and Ag nanowire are found to present a good agreement with the experimental data. We have also computed the temperature and size dependence of lattice parameter of Se and Pb for different shape viz. spherical, nanowire and nanofilm. The results are discussed in the light of recent research on nanomaterials.

Using the plane wave expansion method, we have calculated, for both E and H polarizations, the band structure of 2D anisotropic photonic crystals with honeycomb lattice composed of anisotropic tellurium (Te) rods embedded in air background. The two rods in the unit cell are chosen square and circular in shape. Here, from a practical point of view, in order to obtain maximum band gaps, we have also studied the band structure as a function of size of rods.

In this paper, an inverse method to determine the parameters of metamaterial shrinking device is developed. Different from the traditional design method, of which the transformation function must be known in advance, this method allows us to directly obtain material parameters of device without any knowledge of the corresponding transformation function. Moreover, to further remove the inhomogeneity and anisotropy of material parameters, layered device composed of only homogeneous and isotropic materials is presented based on effective medium theory. The validity of such a method and shrinking effect of designed device are confirmed by full-wave simulations.

In this paper, we present exact solutions to the F = 1 spinor Bose–Einstein condensates with only spin-independent energy by adopting a method of separating the variables, which exhibit nontrivial topology. These solutions can form solitonic fractional vortex and solitonic half-skyrmion with a Q = 1/2 topological charge in the two-dimensional system. We further address a three-dimensional prototype solution.

In this paper, we study the response of a Bose–Einstein condensate with strong dipole–dipole atomic interactions to periodically varying perturbation. The dynamics is governed by the Gross–Pitaevskii equation with additional nonlinear term, corresponding to a nonlocal dipolar interactions. The mathematical model, based on the variational approximation, has been developed and applied to parametric excitation of the condensate due to periodically varying coefficient of nonlocal nonlinearity. The model predicts the waveform of solitons in dipolar condensates and describes their small amplitude dynamics quite accurately. Theoretical predictions are verified by numerical simulations of the nonlocal Gross–Pitaevskii equation and good agreement between them is found. The results can lead to better understanding of the properties of ultra-cold quantum gases, such as ⁵²Cr, ¹⁶⁴Dy and ¹⁶⁸Er, where the long-range dipolar atomic interactions dominate the usual contact interactions.

In this paper, we analyze two phase transitions in exciton bilayer systems: a topological phase transition to a phase which hosts Majorana fermions and a phase transition to a Wigner crystal. Using generic simple models for different phases, we discuss the conductance properties of the latter when contacted to metallic leads and demonstrate the possibility to observe the different phase transitions by simple conductance measurements.