A facile method for preparing highly self‐doped Cu2‐xE (E = S, Se) nanocrystals (NCs) with controlled size in the range of 2.8–13.5 nm and 7.2–16.5 nm, for Cu2‐xS and Cu2‐xSe, respectively, is demonstrated. Strong near‐infrared localized surface plasmon resonance absorption is observed in the NCs, indicating that the as‐prepared particles are heavily p‐doped. The NIR plasmonic absorption is tuned by varying the amount of oleic acid used in synthesis. This effect is attributed to a reduction in the number of free carriers through surface interaction of the deprotonated carboxyl functional group of oleic acid with the NCs. This approach provides a new pathway to control both the size and the cationic deficiency of Cu2‐xSe and Cu2‐xS NCs. The high electrical conductivity exhibited by these NPs in metal‐semiconductor‐metal thin film devices shows promise for applications in printable field‐effect transistors and microelectronic devices.

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A facile approach to make an efficient hybrid bulk heterojunction photovoltaic device with lead sulfide nanocrystals and a low‐bandgap polymer is demonstarted, resulting in a power conversion efficiency of about 2–3%.

Photoconductivity is observed in ZnO epilayers due to photoexcitation in the visible spectral region of 400-700 nm, below the ZnO bandgap energy of 3.4 eV. Photoconductive transients due to visible photoexcitation have time constants in the order of minutes. Treatment of the ZnO surface with SiO 2 passivation layers results in a significant reduction in the photoconductive signal and photoconductive time constant. The photoconductive response is attributed to hole traps in ZnO, where a rate equation model is presented to describe the photoconductive characteristics. A method of extracting the hole trap density spectrum is presented on the basis of the rate equation model and assumptions for hole capture lifetime and carrier recombination lifetime that are validated by experimental time-resolved photoluminescence measurements of the material under study. Traps are found to be distributed near 0.75 eV and 0.9 eV from the valence band edge for SiO 2 passivated and unpassivated ZnO epilayers, respectively.

In this work, we report the manifestations of carrier-dopant exchange interactions in colloidal Mn(2+)-doped CdSe/CdS core/multishell quantum wells. The carrier-magnetic ion exchange interaction effects are tunable through wave function engineering. In our quantum well heterostructures, manganese was incorporated by growing a Cd0.985Mn0.015S monolayer shell on undoped CdSe nanoplatelets using the colloidal atomic layer deposition technique. Unlike previously synthesized Mn(2+)-doped colloidal nanostructures, the location of the Mn ions was controlled with atomic layer precision in our heterostructures. This is realized by controlling the spatial overlap between the carrier wave functions with the manganese ions by adjusting the location, composition, and number of the CdSe, Cd1-xMnxS, and CdS layers. The photoluminescence quantum yield of our magnetic heterostructures was found to be as high as 20% at room temperature with a narrow photoluminescence bandwidth of ∼22 nm. Our colloidal quantum wells, which exhibit magneto-optical properties analogous to those of epitaxially grown quantum wells, offer new opportunities for solution-processed spin-based semiconductor devices.

In this paper, we present a new fingerprint matching algorithm based on graph matching principles. We define a new representation called K-plet to encode the local neighborhood of each minutiae. We also present CBFS (Coupled BFS), a new dual graph traversal algorithm for consolidating all the local neighborhood matches and analyze its computational complexity. The proposed algorithm is robust to non-linear distortion. Ambiguities in minutiae pairings are solved by employing a dynamic programming based optimization approach. We present an experimental evaluation of the proposed approach and showed that it exceeds the performance of the NIST BOZORTH3 [3] matching algorithm.

Light beams with orbital angular momentum have significant potential to transform many areas of modern photonics from imaging to classical and quantum communication systems. We design and experimentally demonstrate an ultracompact array of nanowaveguides with a circular graded distribution of channel diameters that coverts a conventional laser beam into a vortex with an orbital angular momentum. The proposed nanoscale beam converter is likely to enable a new generation of on-chip or all-fiber structured light applications.

Subpicosecond resolution differential transmission measurements of an InN epilayer have been employed to probe the carrier recombination dynamics and hot carrier relaxation processes in these materials at room temperature. We observed a fast initial hot carrier cooling followed by a slower recombination process with characteristic decay times of 300–400 ps. At short times after pulsed excitation, modeling of the observed relaxation suggests that the dominant energy relaxation process is longitudinal optical phonon scattering modified by a strong hot phonon effect. At longer times, a redshift of the peak energy in the differential transmission spectra was observed. This redshift is consistent with a reduction of the bandfilling effect that occurs as the photoexcited carriers recombine.