Heterointerfaces in Semiconductor Nanowires

Abstract

Semiconductor nanowires have attracted considerable recent interest due to their unique properties, including their highly anisotropic geometry, large surface-to-volume ratio, and carrier and photon confinement. Currently, tremendous efforts are devoted to the rational synthesis of advanced nanowire heterostructures. Yet, if functional devices are to be made from these materials, precise control over their composition, structure, morphology, and dopant concentration must be achieved. Their fundamental properties must also be carefully investigated since the presence of a large surface and interfacial area in nanowires can profoundly alter their performance. In this article, the progress, promise, and challenges in the area of nanowire heterostructured materials are reviewed, with particular emphasis on the effect of different types of heterointerfaces on device properties.

Potential energy surface of In and Ga adatoms above the (111)A and (110) surfaces of a GaAs nanopillar

“…Heterostructure formation is a necessary capability to master in catalyst-free NP synthesis in order to create efficient optical devices 8 . Core-shell hetero-structures have been studied in a variety of material systems, but axial heterostructure formation has been elusive in this growth mode.…”

Incorporating polaritonic effects in semiconductor nanowire waveguide dispersion

“…5 Therefore, popular choices of semiconductor nanowires for active waveguiding applications are ZnO, ZnSe, CdS, GaN, and SnO 2 , all semiconductors exhibiting a relatively high refractive index, a direct electronic band gap and the formation of electron-hole pairs ͑excitons͒ as dictated by their relatively large exciton binding energies. 6 Optical transport in waveguides or fibers is characterized by the energy-propagation constant dispersion ͑E-␤͒, and the group velocity, which can both be obtained by analytically or numerically solving Maxwell's equations with appropriate boundary conditions if the dielectric functions ͑͒ of the core and cladding materials are known. [7][8][9] A common approach to include this material dispersion into waveguide dispersion calculations is by using a phenomenological Sellmeier type equation in which the coefficients are obtained by numerical fitting to dielectric dispersion obtained from measurements on macroscopic crystals.…”

Self-Organization of Mesoscopically-Ordered Parallel Rare-Eath Silicide Nanowire Arrays on Si(110)-16×2 Surface

“…The identification of the upper Si(110) terraces as silicon nanowires formed on Si(110) surface is similar to the self-formation of massive Si atomic lines on the Si-terminated -SiC(100)-32 surface (Soukiassian et al, 1997). Silicon nanowires has been regarded as the most promising basic building blocks for the bottom-up assembly of integrated electronic and photonic nanodevices because they have the advantage of easy integration into the existing siliconbased semiconductor industry (Agarawal, 2008;Lu & Lieber, 2007). .…”

“…One-dimensional nanowires have attracted significant attention due to their exotic physical properties and potential applications in nanoelectronic, nanophotonic, molecular-electronic, and magnetoelectronic devices (Agarawal, 2008;Gambardella et al, 2002;Melosh et al, 2003;Segovia et al, 1999;Snijders, & Weitering, 2010;Yeom et al, 2005;Zeng et al, 2008). In particular, rare-earth metal silicide nanowires are excellent candidates as low-resistance interconnections or as fully-silicided nanoelectrodes for attaching electrically active nanostructures within a nanodevice because of their high conductivity and extremely low Schottky barrier height on n-type silicon and their compatibility with current silicon-based integrated circuit technology.…”