USA As Represented by Secretary of the Navy

Thomas H Metcalf

Xiao Liu

Battogtokh Jugdersuren

Daniel R Queen

Qi Wang

William Michael Nemeth

Matthew R Abernathy

Glenn Jernigan

Frances Hellman

A method for producing a sputtered stoichiometric a-AlOthin film. A substrate is placed into a chamber containing an Al target to be sputtered. The chamber is evacuated to a base pressure of about 7&#xd7;10Torr or lower and the temperature of the substrate is maintained. With a sputtering shutter in the chamber closed, Ar gas is flowed into the chamber to backsputter the Al target and Ar and Ogases are flowed into the chamber to presputter the target. The shutter is opened and Al is sputtered onto the substrate in the presence of the Ar and Ogases to obtain a sputtered a-AlOfilm on the substrate.

High temperature sputtered stoichiometric amorphous aluminum oxide

A hydrogen-free amorphous dielectric insulating film having a high material density and a low density of tunneling states. The film is prepared by deposition of a dielectric material on a substrate having a high substrate temperature Tunder high vacuum and at a controlled low deposition rate. In one embodiment, the film is amorphous silicon while in another embodiment the film is amorphous germanium.

Hydrogen free amorphous silicon as insulating dielectric material for superconducting quantum bits

A process for forming a doped nc-Si thin film thermoelectric material. A nc-Si thin film is slowly deposited on a substrate, either by hot-wire CVD (HWCVD) with a controlled H:SiHratio R=6-10 or by plasma-enhanced (PECVD) with a controlled R=80-100, followed by ion implantation of an n- or p-type dopant and a final annealing step to activate the implanted dopants and to remove amorphous regions. A doped nc-Si thin film thermoelectric material so formed has both a controllable grain size of from a few tens of nm to 3 nm and a controllable dopant distribution and thus can be configured to provide a thermoelectric material having predetermined desired thermal and/or electrical properties. A final annealing step is used to activate the dopants and remove any residual amorphous regions.

CVD nanocrystalline silicon thermoelectric material

CVD nanocrystalline silicon as thermoelectric material

This invention provides an extremely accurate way to characterize the Young's modulus of thin film materials with thicknesses in the nanometer range. It takes advantage of a recently developed high Q silicon Young's modulus resonator (YMR), which has a record high quality factor of about fifty million in operation at temperatures below 10 degrees Kelvin (10K). Because of the high Q of the YMR, the temperature stability of the YMR's resonance frequency below 1K, and the extremely high degree of vibration isolation inherent in the inventive design, the relative resolution of the resonant frequency is typically in 2&#xd7;10. This is enough to resolve a resonant frequency shift after a deposition of a thin film onto the sensitive part of the resonator, and to compute the Young's modulus of thin film materials of even a few monolayers thickness.

Growing community of inventors

Washington, DC, United States of America

Thomas H Metcalf