Why does wurtzite form in nanowires of III-V zinc blende semiconductors?

By F. Glas, J. Harmand, G. Patriarche. Physical Review Letters, 2007

670 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We develop a nucleation-based model to explain the formation of the wurtzite phase during the catalyzed growth of freestanding nanowires of zinc blende semiconductors. We show that in vapor-liquid-solid nanowire growth, nucleation generally occurs preferentially at the triple phase line. This entails major differences between zinc blende and wurtzite nuclei. Depending on the pertinent interface energies, wurtzite nucleation is favored at high liquid supersaturation. This explains our systematic observation of zinc blende during early growth of gold-catalyzed GaAs nanowires.

Subfields: Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Materials Chemistry

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/474ea41b2b71b467759271b63ade86473e9fbcce

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Citations in the corpus

• Twinning superlattices in indium phosphide nanowires (2008, background): “Possible explanations for the formation of Wz nanowires are the lower surface energy of the parallel side facets of Wz wires compared to that of ZB wires [19] and the interface energies at the V-L-S three-phase line [20].”
• Crystal Phases in III--V Nanowires: From Random Toward Engineered Polytypism (2011, methodology): “the preferred nucleation site [57]–[59].”
• III–V nanowire photovoltaics: Review of design for high efficiency (2013, background): “[55] with subsequent elaborations [56–61], as being caused by preferred nucleation at the VLS triple phase line.”
• The thermodynamic scale of inorganic crystalline metastability (2016, background): “These nanostabilized phases can persist during crystal growth to sizes much larger than where they are thermodynamically stable (53).”