[BNC-all] BNC E-news for the week of Oct. 3rd

[Anthrop, Heather L]

Travel Changes
Lost Item
Automated Piranha Cleaning Station
Hot Plates for TMAH Etching
Housekeeping Issues
Coral Log-Ins
Seminar
Birck Shut Down


Travel Changes
Changes in the travel industry have prompted some changes to the Purdue travel guidelines that will be effective for travel on or after October 1, 2016. These changes are designed to make travel and expense reporting easier for our travelers, as well as the delegates who support those travelers. Here is a list of the upcoming changes:
*         E-Z Pass devices in rental cars will now be a reimbursable expense.
*         All air tickets that indicate "economy" or "coach" will be reimbursable, i.e. "economy plus". This includes fees for seat selection when booking economy or coach airfares.
*         Early Check-In Fees - for those airlines that do not assign seats (i.e. Southwest) or those that do not assign seats until check-in (i.e. Frontier), early check-in fees will be reimbursable. NOTE: This does not include early boarding fees when seats have been assigned.
*         TSA and Global Entry - Heightened security and long lines have resulted in much time wasted getting through TSA. For those travelers who fly three or more times per year, TSA Pre-check and Global Entry enrollment fees will be reimbursable.
*         Cost Comparisons will be eliminated for domestic trips (inside the continental United States), and replaced with a maximum reimbursable amount. The maximum amount reimbursable will be determined annually by the Central Travel Office based on the average ticket costs reporting by the US Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics. For the remainder of 2016, $400 will be the maximum amount allowed when a cost comparison would have been required.
*         Drive vs. Fly comparisons will also be eliminated - the maximum amount reimbursable for drive vs. fly will be $500. This is also calculated based on the average ticket costs reported by the US Department of Transportation, Bureau of Transportation Statistics, with an additional $100 to consider mileage and parking that would have been incurred.
For questions or concerns please contact the business office.
Lost Item
If you recently lost a multi-tool please see Heather. Must be able to identify brand.
Automated Piranha Cleaning Station

A user recommended we add an automated & designated piranha process station with quick-dump feature.  We welcome this input and will put this on our forecasted equipment list for future procurement.

Hot Plates for TMAH Etching

A user mentioned that the two hotplates used for elevated temperature etching are beginning to malfunction.  We will replace them with new, and thanks for bringing this to our attention.

Housekeeping Issues

A comment was made in this week's survey that incomplete clean-up of equipment and hoods continues to happen in the cleanroom.  This is a continuing problem, and we ask again for everyone to clean up after themselves whenever their processing is complete.  Please leave hoods and equipment in good working condition and clean for the next person.  This is an absolute requirement for a multi-user facility such as ours.

Coral Log-Ins

Users have noticed that other users of our facility don't always enable and disable equipment use in Coral.  This is a serious violation and can result in severe consequences.  Please always use Coral to enable and disable equipment use.  The new iLabs software package will deploy this winter to replace Coral, and equipment will be interlocked under this new scheme.


NEMO5 and 2D materials: tuning band structures, wave functions and electrostatic screening
Tillmann Kubis, Purdue University

Wednesday, Oct. 5 from 3:30-4:30 PM Birck 2001

The successful isolation of graphene in 2004 opened up the exciting new research field of 2D materials. These materials host a long list of unique mechanical, electrical and chemical features that promise important device applications. Reliable performance predictions of 2D nanodevices must embrace coherent quantum mechanical effects (tunneling, confinement and interferences) atomistic effects (corrugation, subatomic confinement) and incoherent effects (phonon scattering and device imperfections). Subatomic resolution is needed, but techniques must be efficient enough to model real-size devices. Recently, the multipurpose simulation tool NEMO5 was augmented with the maximally localized Wannier function (MLWF) representation. This representation offers a good balance between numerical efficiency and subatomic resolution. MLWF parameterizations are highly transferable and free from ambiguities that have plagued empirical tight binding models.

In this talk, I will briefly discuss the MLWF approach and compare it to DFT and atomistic tight binding. Initial results using the MLWF approach for 2D material based devices will be discussed and compared to experiments. These results unveil systematic band structure changes as functions of the layer thickness and the applied gate potential. The electrostatic response depends on the location of the band edges in the Brillouin zone, their degeneracy and associated wave functions. All these properties turn out to be tunable. Scattering rates, mobilities and density of states are tightly bound to such band structure details as well. Even the bandgap is a function of the layer thickness and the applied electric field. Fitting NEMO5's gate control of bandgaps to experimental data allows us to deduce the layer thickness dependence of the dielectric constant in the 2D materials. The enhancements discussed in this talk provide NEMO5 with the new capabilities needed to play an important role in the exploration of novel 2D devices.

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