C. Labbé | Searcharxiv

arXiv2018

The Nitrogen concentration effect on Ce doped SiOxNy emission: towards optimized Ce3+ for DEL applications

Ce-doped SiO x N y films are deposited by magnetron reactive sputtering from a CeO 2 target under nitrogen reactive gas atmosphere. Visible photoluminescence measurements regarding the nitrogen gas flow reveal a large emission band centered at 450 nm for a sample deposited under a 2 sccm flow. A special attention is paid to the origin of such an emission at high nitrogen concentration. Different emitting centers are suggested in Ce doped SiO x N y films (e.g. band tails, CeO 2, Ce clusters, Ce 3+ ions), with different activation scenarios to explain the luminescence. X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) reveals the exclusive presence of Ce 3+ ions whatever the nitrogen or Ce concentrations, while transmission electron microscopy (TEM) shows no clusters or silicates upon high temperature annealing. With the help of photoluminescence excitation spectroscopy (PLE), a wide excitation range from 250 nm up to 400 nm is revealed and various excitations of Ce 3+ ions are proposed involving direct or indirect mechanisms. Nitrogen concentration plays an important role on Ce 3+ emission by modifying Ce surroundings, reducing the Si phase volume in SiO x N y and causing a nephelauxetic effect. Taking into account the optimized nitrogen growth parameters, the Ce concentration is analyzed as new parameter. Under UV excitation, a strong emission is visible to the naked eye with high Ce 3+ concentration (6 at. %). No saturation of the photoluminescence intensity is observed, confirming again the lack of Ce cluster or silicate phase formation due do the nitrogen presence.

cond-mat.mtrl-sci↗

arXiv2018

Mixing time and cutoff for the weakly asymmetric simple exclusion process

We consider the simple exclusion process with $k$ particles on a segment of length $N$ performing random walks with transition $p>1/2$ to the right and $q=1-p$ to the left. We focus on the case where the asymmetry in the jump rates $b=p-q>0$ vanishes in the limit when $N$ and $k$ tend to infinity, and obtain sharp asymptotics for the mixing times of this sequence of Markov chains in the two cases where the asymmetry is either much larger or much smaller than $(\log k)/N$. We show that in the former case ($b \gg (\log k)/N$), the mixing time corresponds to the time needed to reach macroscopic equilibrium, like for the strongly asymmetric (i.e.\ constant $b$) case studied in [LL18], while the latter case ($b \ll (\log k)/N$) macroscopic equilibrium is not sufficient for mixing and one must wait till local fluctuations equilibrate, similarly to what happens in the symmetric case worked out in [Lac16b]. In both cases, convergence to equilibrium is abrupt: we have a cutoff phenomenon for the total-variation distance. We present a conjecture for the remaining regime when the asymmetry is of order $(\log k) / N$.

math.PR↗