Em Erik Roeling

Organic electronic ratchets doing work

The possibility to extract work from periodic, undirected forces has intrigued scientists for over a century—in particular, the rectification of undirected motion of particles by ratchet potentials, which are periodic but asymmetric functions. Introduced by Smoluchowski and Feynman to study the (dis)ability to generate motion from an equilibrium situation, ratchets operate out of equilibrium, where the second law of thermodynamics no longer applies. Although ratchet systems have been both identified in nature and used in the laboratory for the directed motion of microscopic objects, electronic ratchets have been of limited use, as they typically operate at cryogenic temperatures and generate subnanoampere currents and submillivolt voltages. Here, we present organic electronic ratchets that operate up to radio frequencies at room temperature and generate currents and voltages that are orders of magnitude larger. This enables their use as a d.c. power source. We integrated the ratchets into logic circuits, in which they act as the d.c. equivalent of the a.c. transformer, and generate enough power to drive the circuitry. Our findings show that electronic ratchets may be of actual use.

Fabrication of two dimensional GaN nanophotonic crystals (31)

The authors have investigated chlorine based inductively coupled plasma etching of GaN by using different gas mixtures of Ar, Cl2, and N2. The etch mechanism and N2 role have been studied. We found that both ion energy and ion current density are important. The N2 plays a multiple role in etching GaN, chemical reaction, and ion bombardment. A reliable process to fabricate GaN nanophotonic crystals has been developed. Plasma conditions have been optimized toward a balance of ion current density, ion energy, and chemical species density. As a result, flat bottom, anisotropic photonic crystal with a=215nm d=129nm has been fabricated at an etch rate of 320nm∕min and an etch depth of 650nm. For comparison, an etch rate of 530nm∕min has been obtained in etching trench lines down to 1.61μm deep with a width of 500nm. The developed process has been used to fabricate GaN photonic crystal (PC) waveguides for 1.55μm wavelength. Transmission measurements reveal the ΓM stop band in hole type PC and illustrate the feas...

Transmission measurement of the photonic band gap of GaN photonic crystal slabs

A high-contrast-ratio (30 dB) photonic band gap in the near-infrared transmission of hole-type GaN two-dimensional photonic crystals (PhCs) is reported. These crystals are deeply etched in a 650 nm thick GaN layer grown on sapphire. A comparison of the measured spectrum with finite difference time domain simulations gives quantitative agreement for the dielectric band and qualitative agreement for the air band. The particular behavior of the air band arises from the relatively low index contrast between the GaN layer and the sapphire substrate. Our results call for extension of the operation of GaN PhCs to the visible range.

The performance of organic electronic ratchets

Organic electronic ratchets rectify time-correlated external driving forces, giving output powers that can drive electronic circuitry. In this work their performance characteristics are investigated using numerical modeling and measurements. It is shown how the characteristic parameters of the time–varying asymmetric potential like length scales and amplitude, as well as the density and mobility of the charge carriers in the device influence the performance characteristics. Various ratchet efficiencies and their relations are discussed. With all settings close to optimum, a ratchet with charge displacement and power efficiencies close to 50% and 7% respectively is obtained.

Diffusion enhancement in on/off ratchets

We show a diffusion enhancement of suspended polystyrene particles in an electrical on/off ratchet. The enhancement can be described by a simple master equation model. Furthermore, we find that the diffusion enhancement can be described by a general curve whose shape is only determined by the asymmetry of the ratchet repeat unit. The scaling of this curve can be explained from an analytical expression valid for small off-times. Finally, we demonstrate how the master equation model can be used to find the driving parameters for optimal particle separation.