A hypothesis has been set forth wherein the potentials arising from a palladium electrode implanted in the plant extracellular fluid are related to oxygen concentration. A set of experiments was performed to examine the electrochemical basis of this hypothesis: The results indicate the rest potential varies with oxygen concentration. Application of potential pulses to electrodes implanted in tomato stems and electrodes immersed in tap water (simulated groundwater) yield the same form and magnitude of relaxation response. The response can be divided into two distinct time periods: a fast period (a few milliseconds) believed to arise from surface-oriented charge transfer and a slow time period (hundreds of milliseconds) believed to be due to reactant diffusion in the fluid and electrode subsurface charge transfer.

To serve the needs of future submicron electronic applications such as cellular communications and character recognition, the computational elements have to be drastically reduced in size as well as power consumption. A promising approach is based on implantation of oxygen ions into a silicon substrate and subsequent high temperature annealing. The process when properly done, results in a very thin silicon layer separated from the bulk silicon substrate by a thin layer of silicon oxide. In these SIMOX elements the top silicon layer is seriously degraded by defects introduced by the ion implantation process, consequently affecting the performance of devices built on them. A careful selection of processing parameters such as implant energy and dose is essential in order to minimize the defect densities. It is believed that Si interstitials are the main reason for the formation of most defects in SIMOX [1]. Consequently, the reduction of the implant oxygen dose minimizes the Si interstitials, and finally lowers the defect densities in both the top Si and buried oxide layers.