A new class at Oregon State, PH 317: Experimental Physics, is designed to simulate a traditional laboratory research experience for undergraduate students. Several weeks of the class is devoted to Brownian motion experiments. Although this is a common topic for undergraduate lab classes, the experiment still needed some basic exploration...
Impedance spectroscopy is a method of modeling materials with equivalent circuits to determine electrical properties, such as the resistivity and the dielectric constant. We explore impedance spectroscopy, both theoretically and experimentally through applying the method to samples of BaCuS1-xSexF. Grain boundary effects were dominant in the results, and although they...
Spectroscopic ellipsometry (SE) is used to characterize amorphous and crystalline thin films of TiO2. Amorphous precursor films of TiO2 are deposited by radio frequency magnetron sputtering on fused silica and silicon substrates. Annealing the amorphous precursor films induces them to crystallize into either pure or mixed phases of the three...
Semiconducting materials are of immense importance due to their presence in almost all modern devices. It is possible that the surface physics of semiconductors could be used to control the nanoscale topography and properties of these materials, ultimately creating new options for device fabrication. This could result in profound implications...