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"© 2018 Optical Society of America. One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic reproduction and distribution, duplication of any material in this paper for a fee or for commercial purposes, or modifications of the content of this paper are prohibited", [EN] Silicon on insulator photonics has offered a versatile platform for the recent development of integrated optomechanical circuits. However, there are some constraints such as the high cost of the wafers and limitation to a single physical device level. In the present work we investigate nanocrystalline silicon as an alternative material for optomechanical devices. In particular we demonstrate that optomechanical crystal cavities fabricated of nanocrystalline silicon have optical and mechanical properties enabling non-linear dynamical behaviour and effects such as thermo-optic/free-carrier-dispersion self-pulsing, phonon lasing and chaos, all at low input laser power and with typical frequencies as high as 0.3 GHz. (C) 2018 Optical Society of America under the terms of the OSA Open Access Publishing Agreement

Kinetics is a key aspect of the renowned protein folding problem. Here, we propose a comprehensive approach to folding kinetics where a polypeptide chain is assumed to behave as an elastic material described by the Hooke[U+05F3]s law. A novel parameter called elastic-folding constant results from our model and is suggested to distinguish between protein with two-state and multi-state folding pathways. A contact-free descriptor, named folding degree, is introduced as a suitable structural feature to study protein-folding kinetics. This approach generalizes the observed correlations between varieties of structural descriptors with the folding rate constant. Additionally several comparisons among structural classes and folding mechanisms were carried out showing the good performance of our model with proteins of different types. The present model constitutes a simple rationale for the structural and energetic factors involved in protein folding kinetics. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd.

[EN] We report on the optomechanical properties of a breathing mechanical mode oscillating at 5.5 GHz in a 1D corrugated Si nanobeam. This mode has an experimental single-particle optomechanical coupling rate of vertical bar g(o, OM)vertical bar= 1.8 MHz (vertical bar g(o, OM)vertical bar/2 pi=0.3 MHz) and shows strong dynamical back-action effects at room temperature. The geometrical flexibility of the unit-cell would lend itself to further engineering of the cavity region to localize the mode within the full phononic band-gap present at 4 GHz while keeping high go, OM values. This would lead to longer lifetimes at cryogenic temperatures, due to the suppression of acoustic leakage.

[EN] Recent years have witnessed the boom of cavity optomechanics, which exploits the confinement and coupling of optical and mechanical waves at the nanoscale. Among their physical implementations, optomechanical (OM) crystals built on semiconductor slabs enable the integration and manipulation of multiple OM elements in a single chip and provide gigahertz phonons suitable for coherent phonon manipulation. Different demonstrations of coupling of infrared photons and gigahertz phonons in cavities created by inserting defects on OM crystals have been performed. However, the considered structures do not show a complete phononic bandgap, which should enable longer lifetimes, as acoustic leakage is minimized. Here we demonstrate the excitation of acoustic modes in a one-dimensional OM crystal properly designed to display a full phononic bandgap for acoustic modes at 4 GHz. The modes inside the complete bandgap are designed to have high-mechanical Q-factors, limit clamping losses and be invariant to fabrication imperfections.

We have fabricated GaAs/AlAs quantum wires and quantum dots by means of molecular beam epitaxy, electron beam lithography, and subsequent reactive ion etching using SiCl4 and O2. The nominal periods are 300 nm and 350 nm for both wire and dot samples. High resolution x-ray reciprocal space maps of the 350 nm samples exhibit not only satellites corresponding to a periodicity of 350 nm but also additional satellites corresponding to a period of three times 350 nm, whereas there are no such extra peaks in the maps of the 300 nm samples. These secondary satellites are shown to be associated with a discretization effect in electron beam writing. Moreover, we found, that the shear strain in the wires has a distinct influence on the intensities of these weak extra satellites. Hence, they provide a sensitive means for the assessment of shear strains in elastically relaxed quantum wires.

Elastic relaxation of the compressive strain due to the lattice mismatch between SiGe and Si has been studied with both x-ray diffraction and Raman scattering in small (30–100 nm) dry-etched Si/SiGe quantum dots fabricated from high-quality multilayers grown on (001)-oriented Si. The Raman spectroscopic investigations showed that the dot alloy layers have relaxed by approximately 65% from their fully strained value and that a compensating tensile strain has been induced in the Si layers. The relaxation is essentially independent of the dot size and the values derived experimentally compare well with analytical and numerical model calculations.

Photoluminescence (PL) and time-resolved photoluminescence (TRPL) were used to study optical emissions of ultrathin InAs layers with average layer thickness ranging from 1/12 to 1 ML grown on GaAs substrates. We have found that the inhomogeneous broadening of the PL from InAs layers can be well described by the quantum-well model with InAs islands coupling to each other and being regarded as a quasiwell. From the temperature dependence of the exciton linewidth, the exciton–LO-phonon scattering coefficient was found to be comparable to that in conventional two-dimensional quantum wells. In the TRPL measurements, the PL decay time increases linearly with temperature, which is a typical characteristic of free excitons in quantum wells. All these results indicate that the excitons localized in InAs exhibit two-dimensional properties of quantum wells, despite the topographical islandlike structure.

We have studied a GaAs/AlAs periodic quantum dot array (fabricated by electron beam lithography and reactive ion etching) using high-resolution x-ray reciprocal space mapping around the (004) and (1¯ 1¯3) reciprocal lattice points. Both the coherently and the diffusely scattered x-ray intensities were analyzed by performing two-dimensional model calculations and comparing them with the measured reciprocal space maps of the diffracted intensity. From the distribution of the diffracted intensities we deduced the average strain status in the dots. From the numerical simulations it is evident that random elastic strain fields are present, which extend through almost the whole volume of the quantum dot. The simulations of the x-ray measurements revealed that the crystalline part of the dots is considerably smaller as scanning electron micrographs would indicate, namely, 50 nm instead of 65 nm, respectively.

Periodic arrays of 150 and 175 nm-wide GaAs–AlAs quantum wires and quantum dots were investigated, fabricated by electron beam lithography, and SiCl4/O2 reactive ion etching, by means of reciprocal space mapping using triple axis x-ray diffractometry. From the x-ray data the lateral periodicity of wires and dots, and the etch depth are extracted. The reciprocal space maps reveal that after the fabrication process the lattice constant along the growth direction slightly increases for the wires and even more so for the dots.