Photoreflectance and Photoluminescence Study of Antimony Selenide Crystals.

Among inorganic, Earth-abundant, and low-toxicity photovoltaic technologies, SbSe has emerged as a strong material contender reaching over 10% solar cell power conversion efficiency. Nevertheless, the bottleneck of this technology is the high deficit of open-circuit voltage ( ) as seen in many other emerging chalcogenide technologies. Commonly, the loss of is related to the nonradiative carrier recombination through defects, but other material characteristics can also limit the achievable .

Preparation of Graphene Oxide-Maghemite-Chitosan Composites for the Adsorption of Europium Ions from Aqueous Solutions.

The adsorption of Eu(III) on composites synthesised from graphene oxide (GO), maghemite (MGH), and chitosan (CS) has been studied using different approaches. The physicochemical and morphological characteristics of the composites GO-MGH, GO-CS, GO-MGH-CS I, II, and III were determined by XRD, Mössbauer spectroscopy, FTIR, Raman spectroscopy, and TEM. According to the results of batch experiments, the maximum experimental adsorption capacity was 52, 54, 25, 103, and 102 mg/g for GO-MGH, GO-CS, GO-MGH-CS I, II, and III, respectively.

Hybrid Tamm-surface plasmon polaritons mode for detection of mercury adsorption on 1D photonic crystal/gold nanostructures by total internal reflection ellipsometry.

Spectroscopic ellipsometry was used for the generation and study of the hybrid TPP-SPP mode as a sensor probe for the real-time formation of amalgam structures on the surface of a plasmon active gold layer. The Au/Hg amalgam formation features and the mercury atoms' penetration into the gold layer were determined by means of the experimental TIRE data and a regression analysis of a multi-layer model containing the index-profile amalgam layer. The hybrid TPP-SPP mode behavior of the coupled excitations provided more information about the mercury atoms' penetration into the gold layer than the single TPP and SPP resonances did.

Tunable Bloch surface waves in anisotropic photonic crystals based on lithium niobate thin films.

We present an original type of one-dimensional photonic crystal that includes one anisotropic layer made of a lithium niobate thin film. We demonstrate the versatility of such a device sustaining different Bloch surface waves (BSWs), depending on the orientation of the incident wave. By varying the orientation of the illumination of the multilayer, we measured an angle variation of 7° between the BSWs corresponding to the extraordinary and the ordinary index of the lithium niobate thin film.