Because of unique structural, optical, and electrical properties, solar cells based on semiconductor nanowires are a rapidly evolving scientific enterprise. Various approaches employing III-V nanowires have emerged, among which GaAs, especially, is under intense research and development. Most reported GaAs nanowire solar cells form p-n junctions in the radial direction; however, nanowires using axial junction may enable the attainment of high open circuit voltage (Voc) and integration into multijunction solar cells. Here, we report GaAs nanowire solar cells with axial p-i-n junctions that achieve 7.58% efficiency. Simulations show that axial junctions are more tolerant to doping variation than radial junctions and lead to higher Voc under certain conditions. We further study the effect of wire diameter and junction depth using electrical characterization and cathodoluminescence. The results show that large diameter and shallow junctions are essential for a high extraction efficiency. Our approach opens up great opportunity for future low-cost, high-efficiency photovoltaics.

We present experimental results on a GaAs/Indium-Tin-Oxide Schottky-like heterojunction photodetector based on a nanowire device geometry. By distributing the active detecting area over an array of nanowires, it is possible to achieve large area detection with low capacitance. Devices with bare GaAs and passivated AlGaAs/GaAs nanowires are fabricated to compare the responsivity with and without surface passivation. We are able to achieve responsivity of >0.5A/W and Signal-Noise-Ratio in excess of 7 dB for 2 V applied reverse bias with passivated nanowire devices. Capacitance-voltage measurement yields <5 nF/cm2, which shows a strong possibility for high-speed applications with a broad area device.

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We demonstrate concurrent multi-channel transmission at 10 Gbps per channel of a DWDM silicon photonic transmitter. The DWDM transmitter is based on a single quantum dot comb laser and an array of microring resonator-based modulators. The resonant wavelengths of microrings are thermally tuned to align with the wavelengths provided by the comb laser. No obvious crosstalk is observed at 240 GHz channel spacing.