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 have modeled InAs nanowires using finite element methods considering the actual device geometry, the semiconducting nature of the channel and surface states, providing a comprehensive picture of charge distribution and gate action. The effective electrostatic gate width and screening effects are taken into account. A pivotal aspect is that the gate coupling to the nanowire is compromised by the concurrent coupling of the gate electrode to the surface/interface states, which provide the vast majority of carriers for undoped nanowires. In conjunction with field-effect transistor (FET) measurements using two gates with distinctly dissimilar couplings, the study reveals the density of surface states that gives rise to a shallow quantum well at the surface. Both gates yield identical results for the electron concentration and mobility only at the actual surface state density. Our method remedies the flaws of conventional FET analysis and provides a straightforward alternative to intricate Hall effect measurements on nanowires.

We investigated the magnetotransport of InAs nanowires grown by selective-area metal-organic vapor phase epitaxy. In the temperature range between 0.5 and 30 K reproducible fluctuations in the conductance upon variation in the magnetic field or the backgate voltage are observed, which are attributed to electron interference effects in small disordered conductors. From the correlation field of the magnetoconductance fluctuations the phase-coherence length l is determined. At the lowest temperatures l is found to be at least 300 nm while for temperatures exceeding 2 K a monotonous decrease in l with temperature is observed. A direct observation of the weak antilocalization effect indicating the presence of spin-orbit coupling is masked by the strong magnetoconductance fluctuations. However, by averaging the magnetoconductance over a range of gate voltages a clear peak in the magnetoconductance due to the weak antilocalization effect was resolved. By comparison of the experimental data to simulations based on a recursive two-dimensional Green's-function approach a spin-orbit scattering length of approximately 70 nm was extracted, indicating the presence of strong spin-orbit coupling.

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.

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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.

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We report on the fabrication and characterization of symmetric nanowire-based Josephson junctions, that is, Al- and Nb-based junctions, and asymmetric junctions employing superconducting Al and Nb. In the symmetric junctions, a clear and pronounced Josephson supercurrent is observed. These samples also show clear signatures of subharmonic gap structures. At zero magnetic field, a Josephson coupling is found for the asymmetric Al/InAs-nanowire/Nb junctions as well. By applying a magnetic field above the critical field of Al or by raising the temperature above the critical temperature of Al the junction can be switched to an effective single-interface superconductor/nanowire structure. In this regime, a pronounced zero-bias conductance peak due to reflectionless tunneling has been observed.