Electrical transport measurements were conducted on semiconducting nanowires and three distinct current-voltage (I-V) characteristics were observed, i.e., almost symmetric, almost rectifying, and almost linear. These I-V characteristics were modeled by treating the transport in the nanowire as in a metal-semiconductor-metal structure involving two Schottky barriers and a resistor in between these barriers, and the transport is shown to be dominated by the reverse-biased Schottky barrier under low bias and by the semiconducting nanowire at large bias. In contrast to the conventional Schottky diode, the reverse current in the nano-Schottky barrier structure is not negligible and the current is largely tunneling rather than thermionic. Experimental I-V curves are reproduced very well using our model, and a method for extracting nanowire resistance, electron density, and mobility is proposed and applied to ZnO, CdS, and Bi2S3 nanowires.

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Graphene/III-V semiconductor van der Waals (vdW) heterostructures offer potential access to physics, functionalities, and superior performance of optoelectronic devices. Nevertheless, the lack of a bandgap in graphene severely restricts the controllability of carrier properties and therefore impedes its applications. Here, we demonstrate the engineering of graphene bandgap in the graphene/GaAs heterostructure via C and Ga exchange induced by the method of femtosecond laser irradiation (FLI). The coupling of the bandgap-opened graphene with GaAs significantly enhances both the harvest of photons and the transfer of photongenerated carriers across the interface of vdW heterostructures. Thus, as a demonstration example, it allows us to develop a saturable absorber combining a delicately engineered graphene/GaAs vdW heterostructure with InAs quantum dots capped with short-period superlattices. This device exhibits significantly improved nonlinear characteristics including <1/3 saturation intensity and modulation depth 20 times greater than previously reported semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors. This work not only opens the route for the future development of even higher performance mode-locked lasers, but the significantly enhanced nonlinear characteristics due to doping-induced bandgap opening of graphene by FLI in the vdW heterostructures will also inspire wide applications in photonic and optoelectronic devices.

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We locked a 1064 nm continuous wave (CW) laser to a Yb:fiber optical frequency comb stabilized to an ultrastable 972 nm CW laser with the feed-forward method. Consequently, the stability and coherent properties of the ultrastable laser are precisely transferred to the 1064 nm CW laser through the frequency comb’s connection. The relative linewidth of the frequency-stabilized 1064 nm CW laser is narrowed to 1.14 mHz, and the stability reaches 1.5 × 10−17/s at the optical wavelength of 1064 nm. The phase noise characterization in the 1 mHz–10 MHz range is presented to indicate that feed-forward locking a CW laser to an ultrastable comb will offer a potential technique for many important applications, such as optical frequency synthesis and gravitational wave detection.