In this work, we report the effect of sandwiching of Au nanosheets on the structural and electrical properties of ZnSe thin films. The ZnSe films which are grown by the thermal evaporation technique onto glass and yttrium thin film substrates exhibit lattice deformation accompanied with lattice constant extension, grain size reduction and increased defect density upon Au nanosandwiching. The temperature dependent direct current conductivity analysis has shown that the 70 nm thick Au layers successfully increased the electrical conductivity by three orders of magnitude without causing degeneracy. On the other hand, the alternating current conductivity studies in the frequency domain of 10 MHz to 1800 MHz have shown that the alternating current conduction in ZnSe is dominated by both of quantum mechanical tunneling and correlated barrier hopping of electrons over the energy barriers formed at the grain boundaries. The Au nanosheets are observed to increase the density of localized states near Fermi level and reduce the average hopping energy by ~5 times. The conductivity, capacitance, impedance and reflection coefficient spectral analyses have shown that the nanosandwiching of Au between two layers of ZnSe makes the zinc selenide more appropriate for electronic applications and for applications which need microwave cavities.
This study was an attempt to understand the factors influencing the heavy metal distribution in polluted fluvial system sediments. Various biogeochemical processes and anthropogenic factors were playing an important role in altering the concentration of heavy metals in the sediments. This paper has two objectives: The first one is to investigate the effect of the variation in the physicochemical conditions on the speciation of trace elements trapped in the sediments of the Sebou River. The second one is to study the kinetics mobilization of these heavy metals. Batch resuspension experiments were conducted in order to investigate the release of heavy metals from a polluted anoxic sediment submitted to different physicochemical conditions variations. It has been revealed that in oxygenated environment, sediments were oxidized which cause the release of some heavy metals, but their concentrations, as dissolved phase, were sustained constant or were increased with time. However, in acidic and anaerobic environment, most of the metallic trace elements were released together with the iron and the manganese, but some of these elements like chromium were precipitated. However, some of other elements were maintained in solution, which represents a real human health risk.
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