Efficient light-emitting diodes and photovoltaic energy-harvesting devices are expected to play an important role in the continued efforts towards sustainable global power consumption. Semiconductor nanowires are promising candidates as the active components of both light-emitting diodes1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and photovoltaic cells7, 8, 9, 10, primarily due to the added freedom in device design offered by the nanowire geometry. However, for nanowire-based components to move past the proof-of-concept stage and be implemented in production-grade devices, it is necessary to precisely quantify and control fundamental material properties such as doping and carrier mobility. Unfortunately, the nanoscale geometry that makes nanowires interesting for applications also makes them inherently difficult to characterize. Here, we report a method to carry out Hall measurements on single core–shell nanowires. Our technique allows spatially resolved and quantitative determination of the carrier concentration and mobility of the nanowire shell. As Hall measurements have previously been completely unavailable for nanowires, the experimental platform presented here should facilitate the implementation of nanowires in advanced practical devices

An important consideration in miniaturizing transistors is maximizing the coupling between the gate and the semiconductor channel. A nanowire with a coaxial metal gate provides optimal gate-channel coupling but has only been realized for vertically oriented nanowire transistors. We report a method for producing laterally oriented wrap-gated nanowire field-effect transistors that provides exquisite control over the gate length via a single wet etch step, eliminating the need for additional lithography beyond that required to define the source/drain contacts and gate lead. It allows the contacts and nanowire segments extending beyond the wrap-gate to be controlled independently by biasing the doped substrate, significantly improving the subthreshold electrical characteristics. Our devices provide stronger, more symmetric gating of the nanowire, operate at temperatures between 300 and 4 K, and offer new opportunities in applications ranging from studies of one-dimensional quantum transport through to chemical and biological sensing.

We present experimental data on the time and radius-dependent length distributions of Au-catalyzed InAs nanowires grown by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy. We show that these distributions are not as sharp as commonly believed. Rather, they appear to be much broader than Poissonian from the very beginning and spread quickly as the nanowires grow. We develop a model that attributes the observed broadening to the diffusion-induced character of growth. In the initial growth stage, the nanowires are fed from their entire length, leading to a Polya-like length distribution whose standard deviation is proportional to the mean length. After the nanowire length exceeds the adatom diffusion length, the growth acquires a Poissonian character in which the standard deviation scales as a square root of the mean length. We explain why wider nanowires have smaller length dispersion and speculate on the length distributions in Au-catalyzed versus self-catalyzed growth methods.

We report an electron-beam based method for the nanoscale patterning of the poly(ethylene oxide)/LiClO 4 polymer electrolyte. We use the patterned polymer electrolyte as a high capacitance gate dielectric in single nanowire transistors and obtain subthreshold swings comparable to conventional metal/oxide wrap-gated nanowire transistors. Patterning eliminates gate/contact overlap which reduces parasitic effects and enables multiple, independently controllable gates. The method's simplicity broadens the scope for using polymer electrolyte gating in studies of nanowires and other nanoscale devices.

We have compared the absorption in InP core-shell nanowire p-i-n junctions in lateral and vertical orientation. Arrays of vertical core-shell nanowires with 400 nm pitch and 280 nm diameter, as well as corresponding lateral single core-shell nanowires, were configured as photovoltaic devices. The photovoltaic characteristics of the samples, measured under 1 sun illumination, showed a higher absorption in lateral single nanowires compared to that in individual vertical nanowires, arranged in arrays with 400 nm pitch. Electromagnetic modeling of the structures confirmed the experimental observations and showed that the absorption in a vertical nanowire in an array depends strongly on the array pitch. The modeling demonstrated that, depending on the array pitch, absorption in a vertical nanowire can be lower or higher than that in a lateral nanowire with equal absorption predicted at a pitch of 510 nm for our nanowire geometry. The technology described in this Letter facilitates quantitative comparison of absorption in laterally and vertically oriented core-shell nanowire p-i-n junctions and can aid in the design, optimization, and performance evaluation of nanowire-based core-shell photovoltaic devices.

Highly controlled particle-assisted growth of semiconductor nanowires has been performed for many years, and a number of novel nanowire-based devices have been demonstrated. Full control of the epitaxial growth is required to optimize the performance of devices, and gold seed particles are known to provide the most controlled growth. Successful nanowire growth from gold particles generated and deposited by various different methods has been reported, but no investigation has yet been performed to compare the effects of gold particle generation and deposition methods on nanowire growth. In this article we present a direct comparative study of the effect of the gold particle creation and deposition methods on nanowire growth characteristics and nanowire crystal structure, and investigate the limitations of the different generation and deposition methods used.

We report a method for making horizontal wrap-gate nanowire transistors with up to four independently controllable wrap-gated segments. While the step up to two independent wrap-gates requires a major change in fabrication methodology, a key advantage to this new approach, and the horizontal orientation more generally, is that achieving more than two wrap-gate segments then requires no extra fabrication steps. This is in contrast to the vertical orientation, where a significant subset of the fabrication steps needs to be repeated for each additional gate. We show that cross-talk between adjacent wrap-gate segments is negligible despite separations less than 200 nm. We also demonstrate the ability to make multiple wrap-gate transistors on a single nanowire using the exact same process. The excellent scalability potential of horizontal wrap-gate nanowire transistors makes them highly favorable for the development of advanced nanowire devices and possible integration with vertical wrap-gate nanowire transistors in 3D nanowire network architectures.

We compare and discuss the two most commonly used electrical characterization techniques for nanowires (NWs). In a novel single-NW device, we combine Hall effect and back-gated and top-gated field effect measurements and quantify the carrier concentrations in a series of sulfur-doped InP NWs. The carrier concentrations from Hall effect and field effect measurements are found to correlate well when using the analysis methods described in this work. This shows that NWs can be accurately characterized with available electrical methods, an important result toward better understanding of semiconductor NW doping.