In this article, the excitation of dipolar localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs) in both the far- and near-field regions is described in terms of the relevant static, dynamic, and radiative depolarization factors. This approach offers a direct relationship between the evolution of the LSPR spectral line and the depolarization components in an analogous sense to a harmonic oscillator. The static, dynamic, and radiative terms reflect the coefficients of the “stiffness”, effective mass, and damping in the oscillator system, respectively. Hence, one can immediately perceive that the static part of the depolarization factor is mainly responsible for the shifts in the resonant frequency, and the radiative part is responsible for the change in bandwidth. Additionally, the dynamic part behaves like an effective mass, acting as an inertial weighting factor that decides how significant the changes taking place in the system are. From this model, we can rationalize that the qualitative behavior of the far-field efficiency primarily depends on the shifting resonant frequencies, and the corresponding near-field efficiency is highly sensitive to the presence of damping. The model also clarifies the discrepancy in the resonant frequency and bandwidth between the far- and near-field spectra, which is due to the significant presence of the radiative component. These basic descriptions can be used as a guiding principle for handling more sophisticated structures and gaining more rationalized designs for novel applications related to the LSPR mechanism.

Oxygen plasma treatment controls different stoichiometries on the surface of a-HfOx films, giving a recipe to fabricate MIM and TFT devices at room-temperature.

A model to describe the mechanism of conformational dynamics in protein based on matter interactions using lagrangian approach and imposing certain symmetry breaking is proposed. Both conformation changes of proteins and the injected non-linear sources are represented by the bosonic lagrangian with an additional φ 4 interaction for the sources. In the model the spring tension of protein representing the internal hydrogen bonds is realized as the interactions between individual amino acids and nonlinear sources. The folding pathway is determined by the strength of nonlinear sources that propagate through the protein backbone. It is also shown that the model reproduces the results in some previous works.

Over the past decade, SnO has been considered a promising p-type oxide semiconductor. However, achieving high mobility in the fabrication of p-type SnO films is still highly dependent on the post-annealing procedure, which is often used to make SnO, due to its metastable nature, readily convertible to SnO2 and/or intermediate phases. This paper demonstrates a fully room-temperature fabrication of p-type SnO x thin films using ion-beam-assisted deposition. This technique offers independent control between ion density, via the ion-gun anode current and oxygen flow rate, and ion energy, via the ion-gun anode voltage, thus being able to optimize the optical band gap and the hole mobility of the SnO films to reach 2.70 eV and 7.89 cm2 V–1 s–1, respectively, without the need for annealing. Remarkably, this is the highest mobility reported for p-type SnO films whose fabrication was carried out entirely at room temperature. Using first-principles calculations, we rationalize that the high mobility is associated with the fine-tuning of the Sn-rich-related defects and lattice densification, obtained by controlling the density and energy of the oxygen ions, both of which optimize the spatial overlap of the valence bands to form a continuous conduction path for the holes. Moreover, due to the absence of the annealing process, the Raman spectra reveal no significant signatures of microcrystal formation in the films. This behavior contrasts with the case involving the air-annealing procedure, where a complex interaction occurs between the formation of SnO microcrystals and the formation of SnO x intermediate phases. This interplay results in variations in grain texture within the film, leading to a lower optimum Hall mobility of only 5.17 cm2 V–1 s–1. Finally, we demonstrate the rectification characteristics of all-fabricated-at-room-temperature SnO x -based p–n devices to confirm the viability of the p-type SnO x films.