Plane-wave based electron tunneling through field emission resonance states
We acknowledge support from the Basque Departamento de Educacion and the UPV/EHU (Grant No. IT-756-13), the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovacion (Grant No. FIS2010-19609-C02-00), and the ETORTEK program funded by the Basque Departamento de Industria and the Diputacion Foral de Gipuzkoa. L.W. Wang is supported by the US DOE/SC/BES under contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.
Plasmon resonances and tunneling in sub-nanometric systems
In this thesis we have theoretically studied the optical response of several canonical systems with narrow gaps: nanoparticle pairs (dimers), and core-shell systems (known in literature as nanomatryoshkas), in the subnanometric regime (systems below 10 nm). As a first approach, we have used classical electromagnetic treatment allowing a link with previous studies and characterization of the plasmonic modes and near and far fields. We have explored the physics of the plasmon coupling and near field enhancements in plasmonic cavities upon reduction of the gap size, where classical theory predicts extremely strong effects because of the attractive Coulomb interaction between plasmon induced charges across the junction. We have proposed a mechanism for fast and active control of the optical response of metallic nanostructures, based on exploiting the quantum regime of subnanometric plasmonic gaps. We demonstrated that by applying a DC bias across a narrow gap in core-shell nanostructures (cylindrical nanomatryoshkas) a substantial change of the tunneling conductivity across the junction can be induced at optical frequencies. using time dependent density functional theory (TDDFT) we performed the full quantum calculation of the optical response, stability, and electron loss for charged spherical clusters.Based on our results, we tentatively propose an alternative explanation based on the change of the dielectric environment in the immediate vicinity of the cluster.
Complex telemonitoring of patients and elderly people for telemedical and homecare services
The paper presents a project that has as main goal researches, design and implementation of an electronic-informatics-telecom and scalable system, that allows the automatic and complex telemonitoring, everywhere and every time (at home, in hospitals, at work, of mobile subject etc, using several communication paths), in real time, of persons with chronic illnesses, of elderly people, of those having high medical risk and of those with neurolocomotor disabilities.