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We have performed a comparative study of ultrafast charge carrier dynamics in a range of III-V nanowires using optical pump-terahertz probe spectroscopy. This versatile technique allows measurement of important parameters for device applications, including carrier lifetimes, surface recombination velocities, carrier mobilities and donor doping levels. GaAs, InAs and InP nanowires of varying diameters were measured. For all samples, the electronic response was dominated by a pronounced surface plasmon mode. Of the three nanowire materials, InAs nanowires exhibited the highest electron mobilities of 6000 cm² V⁻¹ s⁻¹, which highlights their potential for high mobility applications, such as field effect transistors. InP nanowires exhibited the longest carrier lifetimes and the lowest surface recombination velocity of 170 cm s⁻¹. This very low surface recombination velocity makes InP nanowires suitable for applications where carrier lifetime is crucial, such as in photovoltaics. In contrast, the carrier lifetimes in GaAs nanowires were extremely short, of the order of picoseconds, due to the high surface recombination velocity, which was measured as 5.4 × 10⁵  cm s⁻¹. These findings will assist in the choice of nanowires for different applications, and identify the challenges in producing nanowires suitable for future electronic and optoelectronic devices.

The time-resolved conductivity of isolated GaAs nanowires is investigated by optical-pump terahertz-probe time-domain spectroscopy. The electronic response exhibits a pronounced surface plasmon mode that forms within 300 fs before decaying within 10 ps as a result of charge trapping at the nanowire surface. The mobility is extracted using the Drude model for a plasmon and found to be remarkably high, being roughly one-third of that typical for bulk GaAs at room temperature.

Using transient terahertz photoconductivity measurements, we have made noncontact, room temperature measurements of the ultrafast charge carrier dynamics in InP nanowires. InP nanowires exhibited a very long photoconductivity lifetime of over 1 ns, and carrier lifetimes were remarkably insensitive to surface states despite the large nanowire surface area-to-volume ratio. An exceptionally low surface recombination velocity (170 cm/s) was recorded at room temperature. These results suggest that InP nanowires are prime candidates for optoelectronic devices, particularly photovoltaic devices, without the need for surface passivation. We found that the carrier mobility is not limited by nanowire diameter but is strongly limited by the presence of planar crystallographic defects such as stacking faults in these predominantly wurtzite nanowires. These findings show the great potential of very narrow InP nanowires for electronic devices but indicate that improvements in the crystallographic uniformity of InP nanowires will be critical for future nanowire device engineering. KEYWORDS: InP, nanowire, terahertz, photoconductivity, surface recombination velocity, mobility S emiconductor nanowires are predicted to drive new generations of compact, ultrafast, and high efficiency electronic and optoelectronic devices. Among nanowire materials, InP is especially promising due to its direct band gap and high electron mobility. A multitude of prototype InP nanowire devices have been demonstrated including photodetectors, 1 light-emitting diodes, 2 waveguides, 3 solar cells, 4,5 and field effect transistors. 2,6 Despite these early successes, there remain many fundamental unanswered questions concerning the dynamics of charge carriers in nanowires, and the effects of nanowire size, surfaces, and crystal structure on nanowire electronic properties. A greater understanding of these effects is essential for the future engineering of nanowirebased devices.In this Letter, we examine the ultrafast carrier dynamics within InP nanowires and assess the effects of nanowire diameter, surfaces, and crystal structure. These investigations were performed using optical pump−terahertz probe (OPTP) spectroscopy, a technique which is ideally suited for nanowire studies because it is a noncontact ultrafast probe of room temperature photoconductivity with subpicosecond resolution. 7The contact-free nature of this technique confers a significant advantage over conventional electrical transport measurements, which are subject to artifacts associated with electrical contacts and the models used to extract data. 8,9 A further advantage is that the OPTP measurements are performed at room temperature, so its measurements of carrier mobility and lifetime are directly relevant to future InP nanowire-based devices which will be operated at room temperature.From OPTP measurements on InP nanowires of different diameters, we determine that surface recombination is negligible in InP nanowires. This result is despite the large surface area-to-volume rati...

Using optical-pump terahertz-probe spectroscopy, we have investigated the time-resolved conductivity dynamics of photoexcited polymer-fullerene bulk heterojunction blends for two model polymers: poly͓3-hexylthiophene͔ ͑P3HT͒ and poly͓2-methoxy-5-͑3,7-dimethyloctyloxy͒-1,4-phenylenevinylene͔ ͑MDMO-PPV͒ blended with ͓6,6͔-phenyl-C 61 butyric acid methyl ester ͑PCBM͒. The observed terahertzfrequency conductivity is characteristic of dispersive charge transport for photoexcitation both at the − ‫ء‬ absorption peak ͑560 nm for P3HT͒ and significantly below it ͑800 nm͒. The photoconductivity at 800 nm is unexpectedly high, which we attribute to the presence of a charge-transfer complex. We report the excitationfluence dependence of the photoconductivity over more than four orders of magnitude, obtained by utilizing a terahertz spectrometer based upon on either a laser oscillator or an amplifier source. The time-averaged photoconductivity of the P3HT:PCBM blend is over 20 times larger than that of P3HT, indicating that longlived hole polarons are responsible for the high photovoltaic efficiency of polymer:fullerene blends. At early times ͑ϳps͒ the linear dependence of photoconductivity upon fluence indicates that interfacial charge transfer dominates as an exciton decay pathway, generating charges with mobility of at least ϳ0.1 cm 2 V −1 s −1 . At later times, a sublinear relationship shows that carrier-carrier recombination effects influence the conductivity on a longer time scale ͑Ͼ1 s͒ with a bimolecular charge annihilation constant for the blends that is approximately two to three orders of magnitude smaller than that typical for neat polymer films.