ThinQ: Quantum size effects in thin films on complex metallic alloys

Project funded by French National Research Agency (ANR), grant ANR-07-BLAN-0270. Participating organisations named by the source: CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE - DELEGATION REGIONALE CENTRE-EST. Funded amount: EUR 312,000, as stated by the source. Runs 2007-11-20 to n/a. Source: OpenAIRE Graph, from the funder's project data (collected by OpenAIRE on 2019-12-24); national funding data, not CORDIS. Abstract given by the source: This project focuses on the understanding and the tailoring of the structure property relationship at surfaces of complex metallic alloys. In the last few years, we have contributed significantly to crystallographic and electronic surface structure determination of some typical quasicrystalline phases. This was a necessary step for further studies of surface properties and thin film growth at a fundamental level. We have made significant progress in the study of thin film growth on complex surfaces, which is a topic of ongoing excitement, partly due to the prospect of discovering unusual properties in pseudomorphic films, and partly due to the possibility of using quasicrystals as templates for building nanostructures. - - We have now succeeded in growing artificial quasiperiodic systems by deposition on quasicrystalline templates. We also have discovered that two different phenomena uniquely combine on quasicrystalline substrates: quantum size effects (QSEs) and trapping effects. - The trapping effect is a consequence of an ordered array of specific sites of the substrates which present a strong adsorption energy and act as nucleation centre during thin film growth. This is of interest for a larger research community, where significant work is being done on heteroepitaxial systems, with the idea of fabricating nanostructures on solid surfaces for technological applications. In general, exploitation of natural growth morphology is considered as an alternative to optical lithography to obtain self-organized patterns of nanosized features, such as quantum dots in semiconductor heteroepitaxy. - Quantum size effects relate to the appearance of discrete electronic states arising from the confinement of the electron within the film thickness. QSE is expected to modulate greatly the electronic structure near the Fermi level with the film thickness, and consequently its physical and chemical properties. Therefore controlling the film thickness offers the possibility to [shortened; the full text is on the OpenAIRE page]

Original source.

Source: OpenAIRE Graph: projects of national funders, OpenAIRE, from the project data of French National Research Agency (ANR). Retrieved 2026-10-22. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (OpenAIRE Graph). Selected metadata, adapted presentation; the publisher's record is authoritative. No endorsement by the source is implied. Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).

AI-assisted summary: The project "ThinQ" is funded by the French National Research Agency with a grant of EUR 312,000, focusing on the structure-property relationship at surfaces of complex metallic alloys from 2007 to an unspecified end date. Suggested technology pillar: enabling. Generated by AI from the public source text; it may contain errors and the original source is authoritative.