Sharif Digital Repository

An Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) is a capable tool to manipulate nanoparticles by exerting pushing force on the nanoparticles located on the substrate. In reality, the substrate cannot be considered as a smooth surface particularly at the nanoscale. Hence, the particle may encounter a step on the substrate during a manipulation. In this study, dynamics of the nanoparticle on a stepped substrate and critical pushing force in the manipulation are investigated. There are two possible dynamic modes that may happen in the manipulation on the stepped substrate. In one mode, the nanoparticle may slide on the step edge and then climb up to the step which is a desired mode. Another possible mode is... 

The resonant frequencies and flexural sensitivities of an atomic force microscope (AFM) assembled cantilever probe which comprises a horizontal cantilever, a vertical extension and two tips located at the free ends of the cantilever and the extension are studied. This probe makes the AFM capable of simultaneous topography at top-surface and sidewalls of microstructures especially microgears which leads to a time-saving swift scanning process. In this work, the effects of the sample surface contact stiffness and the geometrical parameters such as the ratio of the vertical extension length to the horizontal cantilever length and the distance of the vertical extension from clamped end of the... 

The morphological manipulation and structural characterisation of TiO 2-MgO binary system by an aqueous particulate sol-gel route were reported. Different crystal structures including pure MgTiO 3, mixtures of MgTiO 3 and TiO 2 and mixtures of MgTiO 3 and Mg 2TiO 4 were tailored by controlling Mg:Ti molar ratio and annealing temperatures as the processing parameters. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) revealed that all compounds crystallised at the low temperature of 500 °C. Furthermore, it was found that the average crystallite size of the compounds depends upon the Mg:Ti molar ratio as well as the annealing temperature, being in the range 3-5 nm at... 

Small high-quality Au/P-Si Schottky barrier diodes (SBDs) with an extremely low reverse leakage current using wet lithography were produced. Their effective barrier heights (BHs) and ideality factors from current-voltage (I -V) characteristics were measured by a conducting probe atomic force microscope (C-AFM). In spite of the identical preparation of the diodes there was a diode-to-diode variation in ideality factor and barrier height parameters. By extrapolating the plots the built in potential of the Au /p-Si contact was obtained as Vbi D 0:5425 V and the barrier height value φB(C-V) was calculated to be φB(C-V) D 0:7145 V for Au/p-Si. It is found that for the diodes with diameters... 

Atomic force microscope (AFM) can be used as nanorobotics manipulation tool for nano particle positioning, pushing, indenting, cutting and etc. control the vibration behavior of AFM and make the micro-cantilever tip track specified trajectory is very crucial to appropriately manipulate particles in nano-scales. The novel combined sliding mode approach has been investigated in this paper to obtain robust nonlinear control scheme for nanomanipulation. First (classical) and second order (SOSM) sliding mode techniques have been developed and applied to nonlinear dynamical and uncertain model of AFM cantilever beam to track the desired trajectories. The simulation results show chattering in... 

A novel simple synthetic procedure for fabrication of high surface area nanostructured TiO2 electrode with uniform particles for photovoltaic application is reported. Modifying the TiO2 particulate sol by pH adjustment together with employment of a polymeric agent, so-called polymeric gel process, was developed. The polymeric gel process was used to deposit nanostructured thick electrode by dip coating incorporated in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs). X-ray diffraction (XRD) analysis revealed that deposited film was composed of primary nanoparticles with average crystallite size in the range 21-39 nm. Field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) images showed that deposited film...