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A single-axis Microelectromechanical system gravimeter has recently been developed at the University of Glasgow. The sensitivity and stability of this device was demonstrated by measuring the Earth tides. The success of this device was enabled in part by its extremely low resonant frequency. This low frequency was achieved with a geometric anti-spring design, fabricated using well-established photolithography and dry etch techniques. Analytical models can be used to calculate the results of these non-linear oscillating systems, but the power of finite element analysis has not been fully utilised to explore the parameter space before now. In this article, the results of previous analytical solutions are replicated using finite element models, before applying the same techniques to optimise the design of the gravimeter. These computer models provide the ability to investigate the effect of the fabrication material of the device: anisotropic <100> crystalline silicon. This is a parameter that is difficult to investigate analytically, but finite element modelling is demonstrated here to provide accurate predictions of real gravimeter behaviour by taking anisotropy into account. The finite element models are then used to demonstrate the design of a three-axis gravimeter enabling the gravity tensor to be measured - a significantly more powerful surveying tool than the original single-axis device.

We report electroluminescence originating from L-valley transitions in n-type Ge/Si$_{0.15}$Ge$_{0.85}$ quantum cascade structures centered at 3.4 and 4.9 THz with a line broadening of $\Delta f/f \approx 0.2$. Three strain-compensated heterostructures, grown on a Si substrate by ultrahigh vacuum chemical vapor deposition, have been investigated. The design is based on a single quantum well active region employing a vertical optical transition and the observed spectral features are well described by non-equilibrium Green's function calculations. The presence of two peaks highlights a suboptimal injection in the upper state of the radiative transition. Comparison of the electroluminescence spectra with similar GaAs/AlGaAs structure yields one order of magnitude lower emission efficiency.

The recently developed precession electron diffraction (PED) technique in scanning transmission electron microscopy (STEM) has been used to elucidate the local strain distribution and crystalline misorientation in CMOS fabricated strained Ge micro disk structure grown on Si substrate. Such structures are considered to be a compact optical source for the future photonics due to the specific undercut for direct bandgap behaviour under strain. In this study, the strain maps are interpreted and compared with a finite element model (FEM) of the strain in the investigated structure. Results demonstrate that the SiN used as a stressor on top of the Ge disk induces an in-plane strain $\epsilon_{xx}$ of a maximum value of almost 2 % which is also confirmed by FEM simulations. This tensile strain can reduce the difference between the direct and indirect bandgaps leading to direct bandgap radiative transitions, with the potential for applications in strained Ge lasers.

We investigate the low temperature transport in 8 nm diameter Si junctionless nanowire field effect transistors fabricated by top down techniques with a wrap-around gate and two different activated doping densities. First we extract the intrinsic gate capacitance of the device geometry from a device that shows Coulomb blockade at 13 mK with over 500 Coulomb peaks across a gate voltage range of 6 V indicating the formation of a single island in the entire nanowire channel. In two other devices, doped Si:P $4\times10^{19}\,\text{cm}^{-3}$ and $2\times10^{20}\,\text{cm}^{-3}$, we observe quantum interference and use the extracted gate coupling to determine the dominant energy scale and the corresponding mean-free paths. For the higher doped device the analysis yields a mean free path of $4\pm2\,\text{nm}$, which is on the order of the average dopant spacing and suggests scattering on unactivated or activated dopants. For the device with an activated dopant density of $4\times10^{19}\,\text{cm}^{-3}$ the quantum interference effects suggest a mean free path of $10\pm2\,\text{nm}$, which is comparable to the nanowire width, and thus quasi-ballistic transport. A temperature dependent analysis of Universal Conductance Fluctuations suggests a coherence length above the nanowire length for temperatures below 1.9 K and decoherence from 1D electron-electron interactions for higher temperatures. The mobility is limited by scattering on impurities rather than the expected surface roughness scattering for nanowires with diameters larger or comparable to the Fermi wavelength. Our measurements therefore provide insight into the performance limitations from dominant scattering and dephasing mechanisms in technologically relevant silicon device geometries.

We demonstrate third harmonic generation in plasmonic antennas made of highly doped germanium and designed to be resonant in the mid infrared. Owing to the near-field enhancement, the result is an ultrafast, sub-diffraction, coherent light source tunable between 3 and 5 micrometer wavelength on a silicon substrate. To observe nonlinearity in this challenging spectral region, a high-power femtosecond laser system equipped with parametric frequency conversion in combination with an all-reflective confocal microscope setup is employed. We show spatially resolved maps of the linear scattering cross section and the nonlinear emission of single isolated antenna structures. A clear third order power dependence as well as the mid-infrared emission spectra prove the nonlinear nature of the light emission. Simulations support the observed resonance length of the double rod antenna and demonstrate that the field enhancement inside the antenna material is responsible for the nonlinear frequency mixing.

Gravimeters are devices which measure changes in the value of the gravitational acceleration, \textit{g}. This information is used to infer changes in density under the ground allowing the detection of subsurface voids; mineral, oil and gas reserves; and even the detection of the precursors of volcanic eruptions. A micro-electro mechanical system (MEMS) gravimeter has been fabricated completely in silicon allowing the possibility of cost e-effective, lightweight and small gravimeters. To obtain a measurement of gravity, a highly stable displacement measurement of the MEMS is required. This requires the development of a portable electronics system that has a displacement sensitivity of $\leq 2.5$ nm over a period of a day or more. The portable electronics system presented here has a displacement sensitivity $\leq 10$ nm$/\sqrt{\textrm{Hz}}$ ($\leq 0.6$ nm at $1000$ s). The battery power system used a modulated LED for measurements and required temperature control of the system to $\pm$ 2 mK, monitoring of the tilt to $\pm$ 2 $\mu$radians, the storage of measured data and the transmission of the data to an external server., Comment: 8 Pages, 12 figures, 5 equations, currently submitted and under review at IEEE Sensors SIEL

Impulsive interband excitation with femtosecond near-infrared pulses establishes a plasma response in intrinsic germanium structures fabricated on a silicon substrate. This direct approach activates the plasmonic resonance of the Ge structures and enables their use as optical antennas up to the mid-infrared spectral range. The optical switching lasts for hundreds of picoseconds until charge recombination red-shifts the plasma frequency. The full behavior of the structures is modeled by the electrodynamic response established by an electron-hole plasma in a regular array of antennas.

Heavily-doped semiconductor films are very promising for application in mid-infrared plasmonic devices because the real part of their dielectric function is negative and broadly tunable in this wavelength range. In this work we investigate heavily n-type doped germanium epilayers grown on different substrates, in-situ doped in the $10^{17}$ to $10^{19}$ cm$^{-3}$ range, by infrared spectroscopy, first principle calculations, pump-probe spectroscopy and dc transport measurements to determine the relation between plasma edge and carrier density and to quantify mid-infrared plasmon losses. We demonstrate that the unscreened plasma frequency can be tuned in the 400 - 4800 cm$^{-1}$ range and that the average electron scattering rate, dominated by scattering with optical phonons and charged impurities, increases almost linearly with frequency. We also found weak dependence of losses and tunability on the crystal defect density, on the inactivated dopant density and on the temperature down to 10 K. In films where the plasma was optically activated by pumping in the near-infrared, we found weak but significant dependence of relaxation times on the static doping level of the film. Our results suggest that plasmon decay times in the several-picosecond range can be obtained in n-type germanium thin films grown on silicon substrates hence allowing for underdamped mid-infrared plasma oscillations at room temperature., Comment: 18 pages, 10 figures

The n-type Ge-on-Si epitaxial material platform enables a novel paradigm for plasmonics in the mid-infrared, prompting the future development of lab-on-a-chip and subwavelength vibrational spectroscopic sensors. In order to exploit this material, through proper electrodynamic design, it is mandatory to retrieve the dielectric constants of the thin Ge epilayers with high precision due to the difference from bulk Ge crystals. Here we discuss the procedure we have employed to extract the real and imaginary part of the dielectric constants from normal incidence reflectance measurements, by combining the standard multilayer fitting procedure based on the Drude model with Kramers-Kronig transformations of absolute reflectance data in the zero-transmission range of the thin film., Comment: Infrared, Millimeter, and Terahertz waves (IRMMW-THz), 2014 39th International Conference on