Indium phosphide nanowires were grown by metalorganic molecular beam epitaxy using the selective-area vapor-liquid-solid method. We show experimentally and theoretically that the size of the annular opening around the nanowire has a major impact on nanowire growth rate. In addition, we observed a considerable reduction of the growth rate in dense two-dimensional arrays, in agreement with a calculation of the shadowing of the scattered precursors. Due to the impact of these effects on growth, they should be considered during selective-area vapor-liquid-solid nanowire epitaxy.
Controlling nanomaterial shape beyond its basic dimensionality is a concurrent challenge tackled by several growth and processing avenues. One of these is strain engineering of nanowires, implemented through the growth of asymmetrical heterostructures. Here, we report metal–organic molecular beam epitaxy of bent InP/InAs core/shell nanowires brought by precursor flow directionality in the growth chamber. We observe the increase of bending with decreased core diameter. We further analyze the composition of a single nanowire and show through supporting finite element simulations that strain accommodation following the lattice mismatch between InP and InAs dominates nanowire bending. The simulations show the interplay between material composition, shell thickness, and tapering in determining the bending. The simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental bending curvature, reproducing the radius of 4.3 µm (±10%), for the 2.3 µm long nanowire. The InP core of the bent heterostructure was found to be compressed at about 2%. This report provides evidence of shape control and strain engineering in nanostructures, specifically through the exchange of group-V materials in III–V nanowire growth.
The growth of InP nanowires on an InP(111) B substrate is reported. The substrate native oxide was not removed from the surface prior to growth. Nanowires were grown at 400 °C from gold catalysts in a selective area manner, without bulk growth. Unlike SiO(2)-based metal-organic molecular beam epitaxy selective area growth, the growth reported here is mediated by surface diffusion with a characteristic diffusion length of 4 μm, about an order of magnitude larger than values for diffusion on bare substrates. A pre-growth heating treatment at 450 °C was found to increase the yield of nanowire nucleation from the gold catalysts.
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