Optical second-harmonic and sum-frequency spectra of clean and oxidized Si(100) and Si(111) samples reveal a strong resonance band at 3.3 eV photon energy. It is concluded that the resonance arises from direct transitions between valence and conduction band states in a few monolayers of strained silicon at the Si-${\mathrm{SiO}}_2$ interface and at the selvedge of clean reconstructed silicon surfaces.

We observe a deuteron beam polarization lifetime near 1000 s in the horizontal plane of a magnetic storage ring (COSY). This long spin coherence time is maintained through a combination of beam bunching, electron cooling, sextupole field corrections, and the suppression of collective effects through beam current limits. This record lifetime is required for a storage ring search for an intrinsic electric dipole moment on the deuteron at a statistical sensitivity level approaching ${10}^{-29}e\mathrm{cm}$.

A new method to determine the spin tune is described and tested. In an ideal planar magnetic ring, the spin tune—defined as the number of spin precessions per turn—is given by ${\nu }_{\mathrm{s}}=\gamma G$ ($\gamma$ is the Lorentz factor, $G$ the gyromagnetic anomaly). At $970\mathrm{MeV}/c$, the deuteron spins coherently precess at a frequency of $\approx 120\mathrm{kHz}$ in the Cooler Synchrotron COSY. The spin tune is deduced from the up-down asymmetry of deuteron-carbon scattering. In a time interval of 2.6 s, the spin tune was determined with a precision of the order ${10}^{-8}$, and to $1\times {10}^{-10}$ for a continuous 100 s accelerator cycle. This renders the presented method a new precision tool for accelerator physics; controlling the spin motion of particles to high precision is mandatory, in particular, for the measurement of electric dipole moments of charged particles in a storage ring.

Over the past decade, the richness of electronic properties of graphene has attracted enormous interest for electrically detecting chemical and biological species using this two-dimensional material. However, the creation of practical graphene electronic sensors greatly depends on our ability to understand and maintain a low level of electronic noise, the fundamental reason limiting the sensor resolution. Conventionally, to reach the largest sensing response, graphene transistors are operated at the point of maximum transconductance, where 1/f noise is found to be unfavorably high and poses a major limitation in any attempt to further improve the device sensitivity. We show that operating a graphene transistor in an ambipolar mode near its neutrality point can markedly reduce the 1/f noise in graphene. Remarkably, our data reveal that this reduction in the electronic noise is achieved with uncompromised sensing response of the graphene chips and thus significantly improving the signal-to-noise ratio—compared to that of a conventionally operated graphene transistor for conductance measurement. As a proof-of-concept demonstration of the usage of the aforementioned new sensing scheme to a broader range of biochemical sensing applications, we selected an HIV-related DNA hybridization as the test bed and achieved detections at picomolar concentrations.