Achieving giant magnetically induced reorientation of martensitic variants in magnetic shape-memory Ni-Mn-Ga Films by microstructure engineering.

Giant magnetically induced twin variant reorientation, comparable in intensity with bulk single crystals, is obtained in epitaxial magnetic shape-memory thin films. It is found to be tunable in intensity and spatial response by the fine control of microstructural patterns at the nanoscopic and microscopic scales. A thorough experimental study (including electron holography) allows a multiscale comprehension of the phenomenon.

Titanyl phthalocyanine ambipolar thin film transistors making use of carbon nanotube electrodes.

The capability of efficiently injecting charge carriers into organic films and finely tuning their morphology and structure is crucial to improve the performance of organic thin film transistors (OTFTs). In this work, we investigate OTFTs employing carbon nanotubes (CNTs) as the source-drain electrodes and, as the organic semiconductor, thin films of titanyl phthalocyanine (TiOPc) grown by supersonic molecular beam deposition (SuMBD). While CNT electrodes have shown an unprecedented ability to improve charge injection in OTFTs, SuMBD is an effective technique to tune film morphology and structure. Varying the substrate temperature during deposition, we were able to grow both amorphous (low substrate temperature) and polycrystalline (high substrate temperature) films of TiOPc. Regardless of the film morphology and structure, CNT electrodes led to superior charge injection and transport performance with respect to benchmark Au electrodes. Vacuum annealing of polycrystalline TiOPc films with CNT electrodes yielded ambipolar OTFTs.

Polymorphism and phonon dynamics of alpha-quaterthiophene.

Low-frequency (10-150 cm(-1)) Raman spectra of the low-temperature (LT) and high-temperature (HT) polymorphs of the organic semiconductor alpha-quaterthiophene at 300 and 10 K are reported. Polarized spectra, assisted by quasi-harmonic lattice dynamics (QHLD) calculations, allow characterization of the lattice phonon dynamics and identification of the two phases spectroscopically. The experimental data can be explained by taking into account the coupling between intermolecular (lattice) and low-frequency intramolecular modes. Finally, Raman mapping is used to investigate the phase purity.

Charge-sensitive vibrations in p-chloranil: the strange case of the C=C antisymmetric stretching.

We have combined DFT calculations with single-crystal polarized infrared spectra to reinvestigate the assignment of the C=C antisymmetric stretching mode b(2u)nu(18) of p-chloranil (CA). The frequency of this mode indeed seems to display a nonlinear dependence on the average charge on the CA molecule (rho), at variance with the behavior of the antisymmetric C=O stretching frequency. The DFT calculations show that the origin of the problem is a drastic, 2 orders of magnitude decrease of the infrared intensity of the C=C antisymmetric stretching upon electron addition. Therefore, no infrared band can be easily associated to this mode in charge-transfer (CT) solids with rho approximately > 0.5. On the other hand, a linear relationship between rho and the b(2u)nu(18) frequency is found in quasi-neutral CT complexes of CA.