We report an experimental study on the correlation spectrums between different sections of a multi-contact GaN nanowire device. Our results indicate that there exists a negative correlation between the voltage fluctuations of adjacent sections of the nanowire separated by a metal contact in the transition region between the low-frequency 1/f noise and the high-frequency white thermal noise. We suggest that this correlation is caused by the voltage fluctuation under the contact area.

We report the properties of low-frequency contact noise of multielectrode GaN nanowire (NW) devices. A two-port cross-spectrum technique is used to discriminate the noise of the ohmic contact from that of the NW section. The diameter of the GaN NW is around 100 nm. The Ti/Al electrodes of the NWs are defined by e-beam lithography. The typical resistance of a NW section with a length of 800nm is about 5.5 k Omega and the two-wire resistance is below 100 k Omega. The results show that the low-frequency excess noise of the GaN NW is much smaller than that of the current-flowing contact, indicating that the contact noise dominates the noise behavior in our GaN NW devices. A careful study of the noise amplitude (A) of the 1/f noise of different types of NW and carbon nanotube devices, both in our work and in the literature, yields an empirical formula for estimating A from the two-wire resistance of the device. (C) 2011 The Japan Society of Applied Physic

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