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Single molecule identification is one essential application area of nanotechnology. The application areas including DNA sequencing, peptide sequencing, early disease detection and other industrial applications such as quantitative and quantitative analysis of impurities, etc. The recognition tunneling technique we have developed shows that after functionalization of the probe and substrate

Single molecule identification is one essential application area of nanotechnology. The application areas including DNA sequencing, peptide sequencing, early disease detection and other industrial applications such as quantitative and quantitative analysis of impurities, etc. The recognition tunneling technique we have developed shows that after functionalization of the probe and substrate of a conventional Scanning Tunneling Microscope with recognition molecules ("tethered molecule-pair" configuration), analyte molecules trapped in the gap that is formed by probe and substrate will bond with the reagent molecules. The stochastic bond formation/breakage fluctuations give insight into the nature of the intermolecular bonding at a single molecule-pair level. The distinct time domain and frequency domain features of tunneling signals were extracted from raw signals of analytes such as amino acids and their enantiomers. The Support Vector Machine (a machine-learning method) was used to do classification and predication based on the signal features generated by analytes, giving over 90% accuracy of separation of up to seven analytes. This opens up a new interface between chemistry and electronics with immediate implications for rapid Peptide/DNA sequencing and molecule identification at single molecule level.
ContributorsZhao, Yanan, 1986- (Author) / Lindsay, Stuart (Thesis advisor) / Nemanich, Robert (Committee member) / Qing, Quan (Committee member) / Ros, Robert (Committee member) / Zhang, Peiming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Diamond and cubic boron nitride (c-BN) are ultra wide band gap semiconductors (Eg>3.4 eV) and share similar properties in various aspects, including being isoelectronic, a 1% lattice mismatch, large band gap, high thermal conductivity. Particularly, the negative electron affinity (NEA) of diamond and c-BN is an unusual property that has

Diamond and cubic boron nitride (c-BN) are ultra wide band gap semiconductors (Eg>3.4 eV) and share similar properties in various aspects, including being isoelectronic, a 1% lattice mismatch, large band gap, high thermal conductivity. Particularly, the negative electron affinity (NEA) of diamond and c-BN is an unusual property that has led to effects such as p-type surface conductivity, low temperature thermionic emission, and photon enhanced thermionic emission. In this dissertation, the interface chemistry and electronic structure of dielectrics on diamond and c-BN are investigated with X-ray and ultraviolet photoemission spectroscopy (XPS and UPS). The first study established that the surface conductive states could be established for thin Al2O3 on diamond using a post deposition H-plasma process. At each step of the atomic layer deposition (ALD) and plasma processing, the band alignment was characterized by in situ photoemission and related to interface charges. An interface layer between the diamond and dielectric layer was proposed to explain the surface conductivity. The second study further investigated the improvement of the hole mobility of surface conductive diamond. A thin layer of Al2O3 was employed as an interfacial layer between surface conductive hydrogen-terminated (H-terminated) diamond and MoO3 to increase the distance between the hole accumulation layer in diamond and negatively charged states in acceptor layer. With an interfacial layer, the ionic scattering, which was considered to limit the hole mobility, was reduced. By combining two oxides (Al2O3 and MoO3), the hole mobility and concentration were modulated by altering the thickness of the Al2O3 interfacial layer. The third study focused on the electronic structure of vanadium-oxide-terminated c-BN surfaces. The vanadium-oxide-termination was formed on c-BN by combining vanadium deposition using molecular beam deposition (MBD) and oxygen plasma treatment. After thermal annealing, a thermally stable NEA was achieved on c-BN. A model was proposed based on the deduced interface charge distribution to explain the establishment of an NEA.
ContributorsYang, Yu (Author) / Nemanich, Robert J (Thesis advisor) / McCartney, Martha (Committee member) / Ponce, Fernando (Committee member) / Qing, Quan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
An electrical current with high spin polarization is desirable for the performance of novel spintronics devices, such as magnetic tunnel junction and giant magnetoresistance devices. The generation of spin polarized current can be from ferromagnetic materials or triplet superconductors.

Anomalous Hall effect (AHE) is an effective way to study the properties

An electrical current with high spin polarization is desirable for the performance of novel spintronics devices, such as magnetic tunnel junction and giant magnetoresistance devices. The generation of spin polarized current can be from ferromagnetic materials or triplet superconductors.

Anomalous Hall effect (AHE) is an effective way to study the properties of magnetic structures. The scattering of electrons by the magnetic moments affects the change of resistance, which can be used to detect the magnetization. In this dissertation, AHE is used to study the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy (PMA) structures, including Co/Pt and Ta/CoFeB/MgO.

Domain walls exist in all ferromagnetic materials. This dissertation studies the domain wall movement in the Ta/CoFeB/MgO structure. A single domain is observed by measuring the anomalous Hall effect. On the other hand, a zero Hall step is successfully observed in a single layer of magnetic material for the first time, which can be used to fabricate advanced domain wall spintronics devices.

Besides the normal ferromagnetic material, the generation of spin polarized current in superconductor is also important for Spintronics. The electrons in superconductors form Cooper pairs. In this dissertation, Andreev Reflection Spectroscopy (ARS) is used to study the spin configuration in Cooper pairs.

Generally, ferromagnetism and superconductivity can not co-exist. In this dissertation, the Bi/Ni bilayer structure has been studied with ARS, and the measurement results show a triplet superconductivity below 4K. The appearance of superconductivity is believed to be attributed to the Bi-Ni interface, and the triplet Cooper pair makes it a promising candidate in superconducting spintronics.

Besides, a Bi3Ni single crystal is also studied with ARS. The measurements show a singlet superconductivity in this material, which further proves the importance of the Bi/Ni interface to achieve triplet superconductivity.

Finally, ARS is also used to study NbSe2 monolayer, a 2D superconductor. The monolayer is verified by the measurements of critical temperature and critical field, which are different from the values of multilayer or bulk. Andreev reflection results show that NbSe2 monolayer is a singlet superconductor and there is no node exist in the superconducting gap for a in plane magnetic field up to 58 kOe.
ContributorsZhao, Gejian (Author) / Chen, Tingyong (Thesis advisor) / Bennett, Peter (Committee member) / Nemanich, Robert (Committee member) / Qing, Quan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
My research has been focusing on the innovations of material and structure designs, and the development of fabrication processes of novel nanoelectronics devices.

My first project addresses the long-existing challenge of implantable neural probes, where high rigidity and high flexibility for the probe need to be satisfied at the same

My research has been focusing on the innovations of material and structure designs, and the development of fabrication processes of novel nanoelectronics devices.

My first project addresses the long-existing challenge of implantable neural probes, where high rigidity and high flexibility for the probe need to be satisfied at the same time. Two types of probes that can be used out of the box have been demonstrated, including (1) a compact probe that spontaneously forms three-dimensional bend-up devices only after implantation, and (2) an ultra-flexible probe as thin as 2 µm attached to a small silicon shaft that can be accurately delivered into the tissue and then get fully released in situ without altering its shape and position as the support is fully retracted. This work provides a general strategy to prepare ultra-small and flexible implantable probes that allow high insertion accuracy and minimal surgical damages with best biocompatibility.

My second project focuses on the injection and characterization of carrier spins in single crystal diamond based nanoscale devices. The conventional diamond-based quantum information process that exploits nitrogen vacancy centers faces a major barrier of large scale communication. Electron/hole spin in diamond devices, on the other hand, could also be a good candidate for quantum computing due to the very small spin-orbit coupling and great coherent transport length of spin. To date, there has been no demonstration of carrier spin transport in diamond. In this work, I try to answer this fundamental question of how to inject and characterize electron spins in Boron doped diamond. Nanoscale diamond devices have been fabricated to investigate this question, including Hall bar device for material characterization, and lateral spin valve for injecting spin-polarized current into a mesoscopic diamond bar and detecting induced pure spin current. The preliminary results show signatures of spin transport in heavily doped diamond films.

Looking into the future, the knowledge we obtained in these two projects, including the strategy to integrate thin-film nanoelectronics devices on a flexible bio-probe configuration, and how to build spintronic devices with diamond structures, could be unified in the exploration of spin-based sensors in biological systems.
ContributorsJiao, Xiangbing (Author) / Qing, Quan (Thesis advisor) / Alford, Terry (Thesis advisor) / Nemanich, Robert (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
In this dissertation I studied the anomalous Hall effect in MgO/Permalloy/Nonmagnetic Metal(NM) based structure, spin polarized current in YIG/Pt based thin films and the origin of the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy(PMA) in the Ru/Co/Ru based structures.

The anomalous Hall effect is the observation of a nonzero voltage difference across a magnetic

In this dissertation I studied the anomalous Hall effect in MgO/Permalloy/Nonmagnetic Metal(NM) based structure, spin polarized current in YIG/Pt based thin films and the origin of the perpendicular magnetic anisotropy(PMA) in the Ru/Co/Ru based structures.

The anomalous Hall effect is the observation of a nonzero voltage difference across a magnetic material transverse to the current that flows through the material and the external magnetic field. Unlike the ordinary Hall effect which is observed in nonmagnetic metals, the anomalous Hall effect is only observed in magnetic materials and is orders of magnitude larger than the ordinary Hall effect. Unlike quantum anomalous Hall effect which only works in low temperature and extremely large magnetic field, anomalous Hall effect can be measured at room temperature under a relatively small magnetic field. This allows the anomalous Hall effect to have great potential applications in spintronics and be a good characterization tool for ferromagnetic materials especially materials that have perpendicular magnetic anisotropy(PMA).

In my research, it is observed that a polarity change of the Hall resistance in the MgO/Permalloy/NM structure can be obtained when certain nonmagnetic metal is used as the capping layer while no polarity change is observed when some other metal is used as the capping layer. This allows us to tune the polarity of the anomalous Hall effect by changing the thickness of a component of the structure. My conclusion is that an intrinsic mechanism from Berry curvature plays an important role in the sign of anomalous Hall resistivity in the MgO/Py/HM structures. Surface and interfacial scattering also make substantial contribution to the measured Hall resistivity.

Spin polarization(P) is one of the key concepts in spintronics and is defined as the difference in the spin up and spin down electron population near the Fermi level of a conductor. It has great applications in the spintronics field such as the creation of spin transfer torques, magnetic tunnel junction(MTJ), spintronic logic devices.

In my research, spin polarization is measured on platinum layers grown on a YIG layer. Platinum is a nonmagnetic metal with strong spin orbit coupling which intrinsically has zero spin polarization. Nontrivial spin polarization measured by ARS is observed in the Pt layer when it is grown on YIG ferromagnetic insulator. This result is contrary to the zero spin polarization in the Pt layer when it is grown directly on SiO2 substrate. Magnetic proximity effect and spin current pumping from YIG into Pt is proposed as the reason of the nontrivial spin polarization induced in Pt. An even higher spin polarization in the Pt layer is observed when an ultrathin NiO layer or Cu layer is inserted between Pt and YIG which blocks the proximity effect. The spin polarization in the NiO inserted sample shows temperature dependence. This demonstrates that the spin current transmission is further enhanced in ultrathin NiO layers through magnon and spin fluctuations.

Perpendicular Magnetic Anisotropy(PMA) has important applications in spintronics and magnetic storage. In the last chapter, I study the origin of PMA in one of the structures that shows PMA: Ru/Co/Ru. By measuring the ARS curve while changing the magnetic field orientation, the origin of the PMA in this structure is determined to be the strain induced by lattice mismatch.
ContributorsLi, Bochao (Author) / Chen, Tingyong (Committee member) / Bennett, Peter (Committee member) / Nemanich, Robert (Committee member) / Qing, Quan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018