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Momentum resolved 4D-STEM, also called center of mass (CoM) analysis, has been used to measure the long range built-in electric field of a silicon p–n junction. The effect of different STEM modes and the trade-off between spatial resolution and electric field sensitivity are studied. Two acquisition modes are compared: nanobeam and low magnification (LM) modes. A thermal noise free Medipix3 direct electron detector with high speed acquisition has been used to study the influence of low electron beam current and millisecond dwell times on the measured electric field and standard deviation. It is shown that LM conditions can underestimate the electric field values due to a bigger probe size used but provide an improvement of almost one order of magnitude on the signal-to-noise ratio, leading to a detection limit of 0.011 MV cm − 1. It is observed that the CoM results do not vary with acquisition time or electron dose as low as 24 e−/A2, showing that the electron beam does not influence the built-in electric field and that this method can be robust for studying beam sensitive materials, where a low dose is needed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of a critical radius on the growth of Si nanowires by the vapor-liquid-solid mechanism is examined. By varying the experimental growth parameters, we have shown a dependence of the minimum nanowires radius with the Si reactive species partial pressure, demonstrating that the critical radius is not a limited one. A thermodynamical model giving a quantitative aspect of the dependence of a critical nanowire diameter on Si supersaturation in a Au-Si droplet is proposed. These results open up a way to grow many kinds of nanowires with nanometric diameter. The size control has important implications for electronic and optical properties of nanowires based devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using correlated experiments on single nanowires (NWs) by microphotoluminescence (μ-PL) and high resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy, we attribute the 3.45 eV luminescence of GaN NWs grown by plasma assisted molecular beam epitaxy (PA-MBE) to the presence of prismatic inversion domain boundaries (pIDBs). This attribution is further strengthened by a recent publication demonstrating the observation of pIDBs in PA-MBE grown GaN NWs. A statistical study of the presence of 3.45 eV lines in NWs PL spectra allows to estimate the ratio of single NWs nucleating with a pIDB to be 50% in the sample under scrutiny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We observe a systematic red shift of the band-edge of passivated GaAs/Al0.35Ga0.65As core-shell nanowires with increasing shell thickness up to 100 nm. The shift is detected both in emission and absorption experiments, reaching values up to 14 meV for the thickest shell nanowires. Part of this red shift is accounted for by the small tensile strain imposed to the GaAs core by the AlGaAs shell, in line with theoretical calculations. An additional contribution to this red shift arises from axial piezoelectric fields which develop inside the nanowire core due to Al fluctuations in the shell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]