The effect of Si-doping on the morphology, structure, and transport properties of nanowires was investigated. The nanowires were deposited by selective-area metal organic vapor phase epitaxy in an N 2 ambient. It is observed that doping systematically affects the nanowire morphology but not the structure of the nanowires. However, the transport properties of the wires are greatly affected. Room-temperature four-terminal measurements show that with an increasing dopant supply the conductivity monotonously increases. For the highest doping level the conductivity is higher by a factor of 25 compared to only intrinsically doped reference nanowires. By means of back-gate field-effect transistor measurements it was confirmed that the doping results in an increased carrier concentration. Temperature dependent resistance measurements reveal, for lower doping concentrations, a thermally activated semiconductor-type increase of the conductivity. In contrast, the nanowires with the highest doping concentration show a metal-type decrease of the resistivity with decreasing temperature.

We report on the fabrication and measurements of planar mesoscopic Josephson junctions formed by InAs nanowires coupled to superconducting Nb terminals. The use of Si-doped InAs-nanowires with different bulk carrier concentrations allowed to tune the properties of the junctions. We have studied the junction characteristics as a function of temperature, gate voltage, and magnetic field. In junctions with high doping concentrations in the nanowire Josephson supercurrent values up to 100 nA are found. Owing to the use of Nb as superconductor the Josephson coupling persists at temperatures up to 4 K. In all junctions the critical current monotonously decreased with the magnetic field, which can be explained by a recently developed theoretical model for the proximity effect in ultra-small Josephson junctions. For the low-doped Josephson junctions a control of the critical current by varying the gate voltage has been demonstrated. We have studied conductance fluctuations in nanowires coupled to superconducting and normal metal terminals. The conductance fluctuation amplitude is found to be about 6 times larger in superconducting contacted nanowires. The enhancement of the conductance fluctuations is attributed to phase-coherent Andreev reflection as well as to the large number of phase-coherent channels due to the large superconducting gap of the Nb electrodes.

No abstract

No abstract

We report on the technology and growth optimization of GaAs/InAs core/shell nanowires. The GaAs nanowire cores were grown selectively by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy (SA-MOVPE) on SiO(2) masked GaAs (111)B templates. These were structured by a complete thermal nanoimprint lithography process, which is presented in detail. The influence of the subsequent InAs shell growth temperature on the shell morphology and crystal structure was investigated by scanning and transmission electron microscopy in order to obtain the desired homogeneous and uniform InAs overgrowth. At the optimal growth temperature, the InAs shell adopted the morphology and crystal structure of the underlying GaAs core and was perfectly uniform.

We performed measurements at helium temperatures of the electronic transport in an InAs quantum wire (R(wire) ∼ 30 kΩ) in the presence of a charged tip of an atomic force microscope serving as a mobile gate. The period and the amplitude of the observed quasi-periodic oscillations are investigated in detail as a function of electron concentration in the linear and non-linear regime. We demonstrate the influence of the tip-to-sample distance on the ability to locally affect the top subband electrons as well as the electrons in the disordered sea. Furthermore, we introduce a new method of detection of the subband occupation in an InAs wire, which allows us to evaluate the number of electrons in the conductive band of the wire.

Ohmic contacts to GaAs/AlGaAs core/shell nanowires are prepared by using a Ni/AuGe/Ni/Au layer system. In contrast to Ohmic contacts to planar GaAs/AlGaAs layer systems here, relatively low alloying temperatures are used in cylindrical geometry. Lowest resistances are found for annealing temperatures of 320 °C and 340 °C. For annealing temperatures exceeding 360 °C, the nanowires degraded completely. Nanowires annealed under optimized conditions preserved their Ohmic characteristics even down to temperatures of 4 K.

Vertically integrated III-nitride based nano-LEDs (light emitting diodes) were designed and fabricated for operation in the telecommunication wavelength range in the (p-GaN/InGaN/n-GaN/sapphire) material system. The band edge luminescence energy of the nano-LEDs could be engineered by tuning the composition and size of the InGaN mesoscopic structures. Narrow band edge photoluminescence and electroluminescence were observed. Our mesoscopic InGaN structures (depending on diameter) feature a very low power consumption in the range between 2 nW and 30 nW. The suitability of the technological process for the long-term operation of LEDs is demonstrated by reliability measurements. The optical and electrical characterization presented show strong potential for future low energy consumption optoelectronics.