In this paper, a transparent conductive ITO/Ag/ITO (IAI) multilayer structure with a high Haacke Figure of Merit (FoM) far surpassing those found up to now is experimentally demonstrated. An optimized IAI multilayer electrode was elaborated by means of RF magnetron sputtering technique. The structural and electrical characteristics of the prepared tri-layered design were investigated. The influence of the annealing process on the IAI electrode performance was also carried out. Unlike the IAI structure as-deposited, it was revealed that the annealed samples maintained an average transparency superior than 89%. This behavior indicates the effectiveness of the thermal treatment for ensuring favorable light management. In addition, it was found that the annealing process paves a new path toward improving the electrode conductivity, where the heat treated electrode at 600°C yielded a very low sheet resistance of 2.95Ω × sq-1. Therefore, by well optimizing both IAI geometry and annealing conditions, we were able to elaborate high-quality coating with a superior FoM of 120.8 × 10-3Ω-1. This makes the sputtered IAI multilayer design a suitable alternative to the conventional ITO-based electrodes for optoelectronic and photovoltaic applications.

The resonant characteristics of superconducting rectangular microstrip patch antenna witha superstrate layer are investigated using a full-wave spectral analysis in conjunction with the complexresistive boundary condition. The complex surface impedance of superconducting patch is determinedusing London’s equation and the two-fluid model of Gorter and Casimir. Numerical results using thefull-wave analysis presented here are in excellent agreement with theoretical and experimental resultsavailable in the open literature. Numerical results show that the effect of the superstrate layer on theresonant frequency and half-power bandwidth of the superconducting rectangular patch is stronger thanthat of the structure without superstrate layer as both the thickness and permittivity of the superstrateincrease. Finally, numerical results concerning the effects of the parameters of superstrate-substrateand superconducting patch on the antenna performance are also presented and discussed

The effect of the presence of electron–phonon (e–ph) coupling in the SiC, GeC and SnC hybrids is studied in the framework of the ab initio perturbation theory. The electronic bang gap thermal dependence reveals a normal monotonic decrease in the SiC and GeC semiconductors, whereas SnC exhibits an anomalous behavior. The electron line widths were evaluated and the contributions of acoustic and optical phonon modes to the imaginary part of the self-energy were determined. It has been found that the e–ph scattering rates are globally controlled by the out-of-plane acoustic transverse mode ZA in SiC while both ZA and ZO are overriding in GeC. In SnC, the out-of-plane transverse optical mode ZO is the most dominant. The relaxation lifetime of the photo-excited electrons shows that the thermalization of the hot carrier occurs at 90 fs, 100 fs and 120 fs in SiC, GeC and SnC, respectively. The present study properly describes the subpicosecond time scale after sunlight illumination using an approach that requires no empirical data. The results make the investigated structures suitable for providing low cost and high-performance optical communication and monitoring applications using 2D materials.