Selective area growth (SAG) of nanowires and networks promise a route toward scalable electronics, photonics, and quantum devices based on III-V semiconductor materials. The potential of high-mobility SAG nanowires however is not yet fully realised, since interfacial roughness, misfit dislocations at the nanowire/substrate interface and nonuniform composition due to material intermixing all scatter electrons. Here, we explore SAG of highly lattice-mismatched InAs nanowires on insulating GaAs(001) substrates and address these key challenges. Atomically smooth nanowire/substrate interfaces are achieved with the use of atomic hydrogen (a-H) as an alternative to conventional thermal annealing for the native oxide removal. The problem of high lattice mismatch is addressed through an In x Ga 1−x As buffer layer introduced between the InAs transport channel and the GaAs substrate. The Ga-In material intermixing observed in both the buffer layer and the channel is inhibited via careful tuning of the growth temperature. Performing scanning transmission electron microscopy and x-ray diffraction analysis along with low-temperature transport measurements we show that optimized In-rich buffer layers promote high-quality InAs transport channels with the field-effect electron mobility over 10 000 cm 2 V −1 s −1 . This is twice as high as for nonoptimized samples and among the highest reported for InAs selective area grown nanostructures.

We report on the growth of axial InAs-on-GaAs nanowire heterostructures on silicon by molecular beam epitaxy using 20 nm diameter Au catalysts. First, the growth parameters of the GaAs nanowire segment were optimized to achieve a pure wurtzite crystal structure. Then, we developed a two-step growth procedure to enhance the yield of vertical InAs-on-GaAs nanowires. We achieved 90% of straight InAs-on-GaAs nanowires by further optimizing the growth parameters. We investigated the composition change at the interface by energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and the nanowire crystal structure by transmission electron microscopy. The nominal composition of the InAs segment is found to be In x Ga 1-x As with x=0.85 and corresponds to 6% of lattice mismatch with GaAs. Strain mapping performed by the geometrical phase analysis of high-resolution images revealed a dislocation-free GaAs/In 0.85 Ga 0.15 As interface. In conclusion, we successfully fabricated highly mismatched heterostructures, confirming the prediction that axial GaAs/In 0.85 Ga 0.15 As interfaces are pseudomorphic in nanowires below 40 nm diameter.

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