Nearly dislocation-free semipolar AlGaN templates are achieved on c-plane sapphire substrate through controlled nanowire coalescence by selective-area epitaxy. The coalesced Mg-doped AlGaN layers exhibit superior charge-carrier-transport properties. Semipolar-AlGaN ultraviolet light-emitting diodes demonstrate excellent performance. This work establishes the use of engineered nanowire structures as a viable architecture to achieve large-area, dislocation-free planar photonic and electronic devices.

One-dimensional compound semiconductor nanolasers, especially nanowire (NW)based nanolasers utilizing III-nitride (AlGaInN) materials system, are an emerging and promising area of research. Significant achievements have been made in developing III-nitride NW lasers with emission wavelengths from the deep ultraviolet (UV) to the near-infrared spectral range. The types of lasers under investigation include Fabry-Pérot, photonic crystal, plasmonic, ring resonator, microstadium, random, polariton, and two-dimensional distributed feedback lasers. The lasing thresholds vary by several orders of magnitude, which are a direct consequence of differing NW dimensions, quality of the NWs, characteristics of NW cavities, and coupling with the substrate. For electrically injected, such as ultralow-threshold and continuous-wave III-nitride NW lasers that can operate at room temperature, the following obstacles remain: carrier loss mechanisms including defect-related nonradiative surface recombination, electron overflow, and poor hole transport; low radiative recombination efficiency and high surface recombination; poor thermal management; and highly resistive ohmic contacts on the player. These obstacles must be overcome to fully realize the potential of these lasers.

Ultrasmall semiconductor lasers can improve the efficiency and resolution of next-generation displays by 10 to 100 times.

We report on the demonstration of a new type of axial nanowire LED heterostructures, with the use of self-organized InGaN/AlGaN dot-in-a-wire core-shell nanowire arrays. The large bandgap AlGaN shell is spontaneously formed on the sidewall of the nanowire during the growth of AlGaN barrier of the quantum dot active region. As such, nonradiative surface recombination, that dominates the carrier dynamics of conventional axial nanowire LED structures, can be largely eliminated, leading to significantly increased carrier lifetime from ~0.3 ns to 4.5 ns. The luminescence emission is also enhanced by orders of magnitude. Moreover, the p-doped AlGaN barrier layers can function as distributed electron blocking layers (EBLs), which is found to be more effective in reducing electron overflow, compared to the conventional AlGaN EBL. The device displays strong white-light emission, with a color rendering index of ~95. An output power of >5 mW is measured for a 1 mm × 1 mm device, which is more than 500 times stronger than the conventional InGaN axial nanowire LEDs without AlGaN distributed EBLs.

InGaN/GaN disk-in-nanowire heterostructures on silicon substrates have emerged as important gain media for the realization of visible light sources. The nature of quantum confinement in the disks is largely unknown. From the unique nature of the measured temperature dependence of the radiative lifetime and direct transmission electron microscopy, it is evident that such self-organized islands (disks) behave as quantum dots. This is confirmed by the observation of single photon emission from a single disk-in-nanowire and the presence of a sharp minimum in the line width enhancement factor of edge emitting lasers having the InGaN disks as the gain media.

The shape and size of self‐assembled mesoscopic surface domains of fluorocarbon–hydrocarbon (FnHm) diblocks and the lateral correlation between these domains were quantitatively determined from grazing incidence small‐angle X‐ray scattering (GISAXS). The full calculation of structure and form factors unravels the influence of fluorocarbon and hydrocarbon block lengths on the diameter and height of the domains, and provides the inter‐domain correlation length. The diameter of the domains, as determined from the form factor analysis, exhibits a monotonic increase in response to the systematic lengthening of each block, which can be attributed to the increase in van der Waals attraction between molecules. The pair correlation function in real space calculated from the structure factor implies that the inter‐domain correlation can reach a distance that is over 25 times larger than the domain's size. The full calculation of the GISAXS signals introduced here opens a potential towards the hierarchical design of mesoscale domains of self‐assembled small organic molecules, covering several orders of magnitude in space.

To date, there have been no efficient semiconductor light emitters operating in the green and amber wavelengths. This study reports on the synthesis of InGaN nanowire photonic crystals, including dot-in-nanowires, nanotriangles, and nanorectangles with precisely controlled size, spacing, and morphology, and further demonstrates that bottom-up InGaN photonic crystals can exhibit highly efficient and stable emission. The formation of stable and scalable band edge modes in defect-free InGaN nanowire photonic crystals is directly measured by cathodoluminescence studies. The luminescence emission, in terms of both the peak position (λ ≈ 505 nm) and spectral linewidths (full-width-half-maximum ≈ 12 nm), remains virtually invariant in the temperature range of 5-300 K and under excitation densities of 29 W cm −2 to 17.5 kW cm −2 . To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of the absence of Varshni and quantum-confined Stark effects in wurtzite InGaN light emitters-factors that contribute significantly to the efficiency droop and device instability under high-power operation. Such distinct emission properties of InGaN photonic crystals stem directly from the strong Purcell effect, due to efficient coupling of the spontaneous emission to the highly stable and scalable band-edge modes of InGaN photonic crystals, and are ideally suited for uncooled, high-efficiency light-emitting-diode operation.

Semiconductor light sources operating in the ultraviolet (UV)-C band (100-280 nm) are in demand for a broad range of applications but suffer from extremely low efficiency. AlGaN nanowire photonic crystals promise to break the efficiency bottleneck of deep UV photonics. We report, for the first time, site-controlled epitaxy of AlGaN nanowire arrays with Al incorporation controllably varied across nearly the entire compositional range. It is also observed that an Al-rich AlGaN shell structure is spontaneously formed, significantly suppressing nonradiative surface recombination. An internal quantum efficiency up to 45% was measured at room-temperature. We have further demonstrated large area AlGaN nanowire LEDs operating in the UV-C band on sapphire substrate, which exhibit excellent optical and electrical performance, including a small turn-on voltage of ~4.4 V and an output power of ~0.93 W/cm at a current density of 252 A/cm. The controlled synthesis of AlGaN subwavelength nanostructures with well-defined size, spacing, and spatial arrangement and tunable emission opens up new opportunities for developing high efficiency LEDs and lasers and promises to break the efficiency bottleneck of deep UV photonics.