Abstract: Molecular dynamics simulations using the Brenner potential have been performed to investigate reaction mechanisms of various hydrocarbon radicals with low kinetic energies on amorphous hydrogenated carbon (a-C:H) surfaces and to simulate thin a-C:H film growth. Experimental data from an expanding thermal plasma setup were used as input for the simulations. The hydrocarbon reaction mechanisms were studied both during growth of the films and on a set of surface sites specific for a-C:H surfaces. Thin film growth was studied using experimentally detected growth species. It is found that the reaction mechanisms and sticking coefficients are dependent on the specific surface sites, and the structural properties of the growth radicals. Furthermore, it is found that thin a-C:H films can be densified using an additional H-flux towards the substrate.

Abstract: We investigate the effects of coupling to multiple-phonon modes on the properties of a Holstein polaron. To this end, we generalize the Momentum Average approximations MA((0)) and MA((1)) to deal with multiple-phonon modes. As for a single-phonon mode, these approximations are found to be numerically very efficient. They become exact for very weak or very strong couplings, and are highly accurate in the intermediate regimes, e.g. the spectral weights obey exactly the first six, respectively eight, sum rules. Our results show that the effect on ground-state properties is cumulative in nature. As a result, if the effective coupling to one mode is much larger than to all the others, this mode effectively determines the ground-state properties. However, even very weak coupling to a second phonon mode has important non-perturbational effects on the higher-energy spectrum, in particular on the dispersion and the phonon statistics of the polaron band. This has important consequences on the analysis and interpretation of data for real materials.

Abstract: We model the fluorescence spectra of planar spin oscillators to find conditions that maximize spin resonance fluorescence. Spin oscillators perform Rabi oscillations under the effect of a periodic effective magnetic field caused by the winding motion of an electron in a gradient of magnetic field. We show that, despite the weak coupling of the spin magnetic dipole to the vacuum, spin oscillators excited by a direct current output a few nanowatts of microwave power, which is comparable to the best microwave sources. The large quantum efficiency relies on the combination of two effects. On the one hand, the spontaneous emission rate is enhanced by the synchronization of spin oscillators, which interact through the microwave field that they emit. On the other hand, the huge Rabi frequencies experienced by spin oscillators promote spins into upper levels of Zeeman transitions, from which a radiative cascade is triggered. We demonstrate different regimes of fluorescence which correspond to different values of the Rabi period relative to the spontaneous decay time and to the oscillator dwell time in the gradient of magnetic field. We investigate the device parameters which make these regimes experimentally accessible and find conditions that optimize microwave output. We find that microwave emission is centered around the cutoff frequency of spin oscillators. This has the advantage that the peak emission frequency may be tuned from zero continuously up to a few hundred gigahertz using an electrostatic gate. Quite remarkably for a spintronics effect, electrically induced spin resonance fluorescence does not require the injection of a spin polarized current. In fact, we show that microwave spectra are mostly independent of the incoming spin polarization except for magnetic waveguides which are shorter than a certain critical length, which we will specify.