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Ru/BC multilayer mirrors are used for hard X-ray monochromators with moderate spectral resolution and high integral flux. To overcome the problem of large compressive stress inherent in Ru/BC multilayers, a reactive sputtering technique using a mixture working gas of argon and nitrogen with different partial pressures was tested, and the fabricated multilayers had a period of 3 nm. The intrinsic stress was essentially reduced after nitridation and relaxed to zero value at approximately 15% partial pressure of nitrogen in the working gas. Interface roughness was slightly increased which can be caused by the polycrystalline structure inside the nitridated samples. More importantly, the nitridated multilayers showed an enhanced reflectance (67% at 8.04 keV photon energy) as compared with the one fabricated with pure Ar (54%). The structure analysis with transmission electron microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy demonstrated that nitrogen incorporated into a multilayer structure was mostly located in the BC layers forming BN compounds, which suppressed the diffusion of boron, stabilized the interfaces and enhanced the reflectance.

Two kinds of Al/Zr (Al(1%wtSi)/Zr and Al(Pure)/Zr) multilayers for extreme ultraviolet (EUV) optics were deposited on fluorine doped tin oxide coated glass by using direct-current magnetron sputtering technology. The comparison of the two systems shows that the Al(1%wtSi)/Zr multilayers have the lowest interfacial roughness and highest reflectivity. Based on the X-ray diffraction, the performance of the two systems is determined by the crystallization of Al layer. To fully understand the Al(1%wtSi)/Zr multilayer, we built up a two-layer model to fit situation of the AFM images, and simulate the grazing incident x-ray reflection-measurements of multilayers with various periods (N = 10, 40, 60, 80). Below 40 periods, the roughness components are lowered. After 40 periods, both surface and interfacial roughness increase with the period number, and decrease the reflectance. According to transmission electron microscope images, the model can represent the variable structure of the system.

With the power conversion efficiency of binary polymer solar cells dramatically improved, the thermal stability of the small-molecule acceptors raised the main concerns on the device operating stability. Here, to address this issue, thiophene-dicarboxylate spacer tethered small-molecule acceptors are designed, and their molecular geometries are further regulated via the thiophene-core isomerism engineering, affording dimeric TDY-α with a 2, 5-substitution and TDY-β with 3, 4-substitution on the core. It shows that TDY-α processes a higher glass transition temperature, better crystallinity relative to its individual small-molecule acceptor segment and isomeric counterpart of TDY-β, and a more stable morphology with the polymer donor. As a result, the TDY-α based device delivers a higher device efficiency of 18.1%, and most important, achieves an extrapolated lifetime of about 35000 hours that retaining 80% of their initial efficiency. Our result suggests that with proper geometry design, the tethered small-molecule acceptors can achieve both high device efficiency and operating stability.

In this study, we achieved fully-printed flexible n-type tin oxide (SnO2) thin-film transistors (TFTs) and logic inverters. The SnO2 transistors exhibit outstanding performance with high saturation mobility of 13.3 cm2...

The geometrical factor in the grazing incident x-ray fluorescence analysis is an important angle-dependent term, which can have a great effect on the measured data. In this paper, the effects of the geometrical factor on the florescence yield have been demonstrated. A formula is presented to estimate the geometrical factor, which includes the experimental parameters of the beam and setup. The validity of this formula is proven by the good agreement between the calculated fluorescence yields with the experimental results in grazing incident x-ray fluorescence analysis.

The microstructure evolution of magnetron-sputtered Ni/C multilayers was investigated by varying the Ni and C layer thickness in the region of a few nanometers. For the samples having 2.6-nm-thick C layers, the interface width increases from 0.37 to 0.81 nm as the Ni layer thickness decreases from 4.3 to 1.3 nm. Especially for the samples with Ni layers less than 2.0 nm, the interface width changes significantly due to the discontinuously distributed Ni crystallites. For the samples having 2.8-nm-thick Ni layers, the interface width increases from 0.37 to 0.59 nm when the C layer thickness decreases from 4.3 to 0.7 nm. The evolution of interface microstructures with varied Ni and C layers is explained based on a proposed simple growth model of Ni and C layers.

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