Direct Electrical Probing of Periodic Modulation of Zinc-Dopant Distributions in Planar Gallium Arsenide Nanowires
- 9 February 2017
- journal article
- Published by American Chemical Society (ACS) in ACS Nano
- Vol. 11 (2), 1530-1539
- https://doi.org/10.1021/acsnano.6b06853
Abstract
Selective lateral epitaxial (SLE) semiconductor nanowires (NWs), with their perfect in-plane epitaxial alignment, ability to form lateral complex p-n junctions in situ, and compatibility with planar processing, are a distinctive platform for next-generation device development. However, the incorporation and distribution of impurity dopants in these planar NWs via the vapor-liquid-solid growth mechanism remain relatively unexplored. Here, we present a detailed study of SLE planar GaAs NWs containing multiple alternating axial segments doped with Si and Zn impurities by metalorganic chemical vapor deposition. The dopant profile of the lateral multi-p-n junction GaAs NWs was imaged simultaneously with nanowire topography using scanning microwave impedance microscopy and correlated with infrared scattering-type near-field optical microscopy. Our results provide unambiguous evidence that Zn dopants in the periodically twinned and topologically corrugated p-type segments are preferentially segregated at twin plane boundaries, while Si impurity atoms are uniformly distributed within the n-type segments of the NWs. These results are further supported by microwave impedance modulation microscopy. The density functional theory based modeling shows that the presence of Zn dopant atoms reduces the formation energy of these twin planes, and the effect becomes significantly stronger with a slight increase of Zn concentration. This implies that the twin formation is expected to appear when a threshold planar concentration of Zn is achieved, making the onset and twin periodicity dependent on both Zn concentration and nanowire diameter, in perfect agreement with our experimental observations.Keywords
Funding Information
- Division of Materials Research (1508140)
This publication has 65 references indexed in Scilit:
- Semiconductor nanowire lasersNature Reviews Materials, 2016
- III–V Nanowire Transistors for Low-Power Logic Applications: A Review and OutlookIEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, 2015
- III–V Nanowire Complementary Metal–Oxide Semiconductor Transistors Monolithically Integrated on SiNano Letters, 2015
- A GaAs Nanowire Array Solar Cell With 15.3% Efficiency at 1 SunIEEE Journal of Photovoltaics, 2015
- Mode Profiling of Semiconductor Nanowire LasersNano Letters, 2015
- Template-assisted selective epitaxy of III–V nanoscale devices for co-planar heterogeneous integration with SiApplied Physics Letters, 2015
- High-Speed Planar GaAs Nanowire Arrays with fmax > 75 GHz by Wafer-Scale Bottom-up GrowthNano Letters, 2014
- III–V nanowire photovoltaics: Review of design for high efficiencyPhysica Status Solidi (RRL) – Rapid Research Letters, 2013
- Scalable synthesis and device integration of self-registered one-dimensional zinc oxide nanostructures and related materialsChemical Society Reviews, 2012
- Toward Industrial-Scale Fabrication of Nanowire-Based DevicesChemistry of Materials, 2007