This paper discusses the results of high temperature resistivity and Hall effect studies of Mg-doped GaN and AlxGa1−xN epilayers (0.05 < x < 0.23). The studied samples were grown by molecular beam epitaxy on low temperature buffers of GaN and AlN deposited on a sapphire substrate. The experiments were carried out at temperatures ranging from 300 up to 1000 K. Up to a certain critical temperature TC (around 800 K), a typical increase of the conduction processes due to the excitation of impurity states has been observed with an activation energy of about EA = 200 meV. However, at this critical temperature TC, an annealing effect was observed in all the investigated samples. At this critical temperature, the increase in the free carrier concentration as a function of time leads to an irreversible decrease in the samples’ resistivity of more than 60%. The observed temperature dependences of the electrical transport properties are analyzed in the frame of an impurity model including shallow donors and Mg-related acceptors (with EA ∼ 200 meV). In some cases, an additional conduction channel not related to free carriers in the valence band must be taken into account. This can lead to an incorrect determination of hole concentration in the valence band, an important parameter in the process of radiative recombination.

We investigated quantum Hall states in an inverted HgTe quantum well (QW) close to the critical thickness using transconductance fluctuation (TF) measurements. In the conduction band, several integer quantum Hall states were observed, corresponding to filling factors ν=1,2,3,4. For magnetic fields above 2 T, quantum Hall states ν=0 were observed in the normal gap. These observations agreed well with the previous studies of quantum Hall states on GaAs QWs and graphene. Interestingly, TFs corresponding to anomalous positive filling factor ν were clearly observed in the valence band. We attribute the emergence of those TFs to the localization and charging of the heavy holes located in the side maxima of the valence band.

We report on the far-infrared magnetospectroscopy of HgTe quantum wells with inverted band ordering at different electron concentrations. We particularly focus on optical transitions from zero-mode Landau levels, which split from the edges of electron-like and hole-like bands. We observe a pronounced dependence of the transition energies on the electron concentration varied by persistent photoconductivity effect. This is striking evidence that in addition to the already well-documented crystalline and interface asymmetries, electron-electron interactions also have a significant impact on the usual behavior of the optical transitions from zero mode Landau levels.

Nuclear magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has became an unavoidable medical tool in spite of its poor sensitivity. This fact motivates the efforts to enhance the nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) probe performance. Thus, the nuclear spin excitation and detection, classically performed using radio-frequency coils, are required to be highly sensitive and homogeneous. The space harmonics suppression (SHS) method, already demonstrated to construct coil producing homogenous static magnetic field, is used in this work to design radio-frequency coils. The SHS method is used to determine the distribution of the electrical conductive wires which are organized in a saddle-coil-like configuration. The theoretical study of these SHS coils allows one to expect an enhancement of the signal-to-noise ratio with respect to saddle coil. Coils prototypes were constructed and tested to measure 1H NMR signal at a low magnetic field (8 mT) and perform MRI acquired at a high magnetic field (3 T). The signal-to-noise ratios of these SHS coils are compared to the one of saddle coil and birdcage (in the 3 T case) of the same size under the same pulse sequence conditions demonstrating the performance enhancement allowed by the SHS coils.