Twinning superlattices in indium phosphide nanowires

By R. Algra, M. Verheijen, Magnus Borgström, L. Feiner, G. Immink, W. V. Enckevort, E. Vlieg, E. Bakkers. Nature, 2008

619 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Semiconducting nanowires offer the possibility of nearly unlimited complex bottom-up design, which allows for new device concepts. However, essential parameters that determine the electronic quality of the wires, and which have not been controlled yet for the III–V compound semiconductors, are the wire crystal structure and the stacking fault density. In addition, a significant feature would be to have a constant spacing between rotational twins in the wires such that a twinning superlattice is formed, as this is predicted to induce a direct bandgap in normally indirect bandgap semiconductors, such as silicon and gallium phosphide. Optically active versions of these technologically relevant semiconductors could have a significant impact on the electronics and optics industry. Here we show first that we can control the crystal structure of indium phosphide (InP) nanowires by using impurity dopants. We have found that zinc decreases the activation barrier for two-dimensional nucleation growth of zinc-blende InP and therefore promotes crystallization of the InP nanowires in the zinc-blende, instead of the commonly found wurtzite, crystal structure. More importantly, we then demonstrate that we can, once we have enforced the zinc-blende crystal structure, induce twinning superlattices with long-range order in InP nanowires. We can tune the spacing of the superlattices by changing the wire diameter and the zinc concentration, and we present a model based on the distortion of the catalyst droplet in response to the evolution of the cross-sectional shape of the nanowires to quantitatively explain the formation of the periodic twinning.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Electronic Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8ea9f3553076f7abbccfe1fe2f3479f57792417d

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Citations in the corpus

Nanowires With Promise for Photovoltaics (2011, background): “eled [59], we observe periodic NW twinning for the use of both”
Crystal Phases in III--V Nanowires: From Random Toward Engineered Polytypism (2011, methodology): “Impurities could influence surface or step energies [22] as well as the solubility of the growth species in the particle [64].”
In situ etching for total control over axial and radial nanowire growth (2010, methodology): “Tentatively, we propose that the surface tension between the metal particle and the NW interface is affected by the introduction of HCl, similar to the effect of using diethylzinc during InP NW growth [23].”