Publications by authors named "Adriel Dominguez"

We present a femtosecond time-resolved optical pump-soft x-ray probe photoemission study in which we follow the dynamics of charge transfer at the interface of water and anatase TiO_{2}(101). By combining our observation of transient oxygen O 1s core level peak shifts at submonolayer water coverages with Ehrenfest molecular dynamics simulations we find that ultrafast interfacial hole transfer from TiO_{2} to molecularly adsorbed water is completed within the 285 fs time resolution of the experiment. This is facilitated by the formation of a new hydrogen bond between an O_{2c} site at the surface and a physisorbed water molecule.

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Elucidating the carrier density at which strongly bound excitons dissociate into a plasma of uncorrelated electron-hole pairs is a central topic in the many-body physics of semiconductors. However, there is a lack of information on the high-density response of excitons absorbing in the near-to-mid ultraviolet, due to the absence of suitable experimental probes in this elusive spectral range. Here, we present a unique combination of many-body perturbation theory and state-of-the-art ultrafast broadband ultraviolet spectroscopy to unveil the interplay between the ultraviolet-absorbing two-dimensional excitons of anatase TiO_{2} and a sea of electron-hole pairs.

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Controlling the excitonic optical properties of room temperature semiconductors using time-dependent perturbations is key to future optoelectronic applications. The optical Stark effect in bulk and low-dimensional materials has recently shown exciton shifts below 20 meV. Here, we demonstrate dynamical tuning of the exciton properties by photoinduced coherent acoustic phonons in the cheap and abundant wide-gap semiconductor anatase titanium dioxide (TiO) in single crystalline form.

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The way nuclear motion affects electronic responses has become a very hot topic in materials science. Coherent acoustic phonons can dynamically modify optical, magnetic, and mechanical properties at ultrasonic frequencies, with promising applications as sensors and transducers. Here, by means of ultrafast broadband deep-ultraviolet spectroscopy, we demonstrate that coherent acoustic phonons confined in anatase TiO nanoparticles can selectively modulate the oscillator strength of the two-dimensional bound excitons supported by the material.

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The particle-particle random phase approximation (pp-RPA) is a promising method for studying charge transfer(CT) excitations. Through a detailed analysis on two-electron deficient systems, we show that the pp-RPA is always able to recover the long-distance asymptotic -1/R trend for CT excitations as a result of the concerted effect between orbital energies and the pp-RPA kernel. We also provide quantitative results for systems with relatively short donor-acceptor distances.

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Density functional theory (DFT) and Car-Parinello molecular dynamic simulations were employed to investigate the interaction of acetic acid with non-polar facets of ultra-thin ZnO nanowires. We consider both a dry and a water environment as well as different molecule coverages for the hydrated system. Our calculations reveal that the fully-covered nanowire is energetically favored in the aqueous environment at room temperature.

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