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We have studied oxygen-plasma assisted molecular-beam epitaxy growth of ZnMgO nanostructures catalysed by gold. The growth was carried out at temperatures ranging from 350 to 900 °C. Au droplets were prepared by annealing a thermally evaporated Au thin film, or by deposition of Au colloidal particles, or by electron-beam lithography with a subsequent Au lift-off deposition process. The resulting nanowires grow at temperatures in the range 700–850 °C with diameter 40–100 nm and with length up to 4 μm. In order to increase nanowire density and reduce tapering, two-step growth with a ZnO low-temperature buffer-layer was successfully implemented. To study Mg incorporation into ZnO nanowires, Zn1–xMgxO nanowires were grown with normalized Mg flux up to 11%. High resolution microscopy, energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction reveal that Mg-doped nanowires grow in single phase with Mg content up to 7.5%. (© 2013 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

One of the main limiting factors in the carrier mobility in semiconductor nanowires is the presence of deep trap levels. While deep-level transient spectroscopy (DLTS) has proved to be a powerful tool in analysing traps in bulk semiconductors, this technique is ineffective for the characterisation of nanowires due to their very small capacitance. Here we introduce a new technique for measuring the spectrum of deep traps in nanowires. In current-mode DLTS (I-DLTS) the temperature-dependence of the transient current through a nanowire field-effect transistor in response to an applied gate voltage pulse is measured. We demonstrate the applicability of I-DLTS to determine the activation energy and capture cross-sections of several deep defect states in zinc oxide nanowires. In addition to characterising deep defect states, we show that I-DLTS can be used to measure the surface barrier height in semiconductor nanowires., Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures

We report the observation of phase coherent transport in catalyst-free InAs and InAs1–xSbx nanowires grown by molecular beam epitaxy on silicon (111) substrates. We investigate three different methods to gain information on the phase coherence length of the nanowires: first through the study of universal conductance fluctuations as a function of both magnetic field and gate voltage and then through localisation effects. The analysis of these different quantum effects gave consistent results and a phase-coherence length in the hundred nanometre range was extracted for all nanowires below 10 K. This demonstrates the potential of catalyst-free nanowires as building blocks for future quantum electronics devices directly integrated with silicon circuits.

We report the growth of InAs$_{1-x}$Sb$_{x}$ nanowires ($0\leq x \leq 0.15$) grown by catalyst-free molecular beam epitaxy on silicon (111) substrates. We observed a sharp decrease of stacking fault density in the InAs$_{1-x}$Sb$_{x}$ nanowire crystal structure with increasing antimony content. This decrease leads to a significant increase in the field-effect mobility, this being more than three times greater at room temperature for InAs$_{0.85}$Sb$_{0.15}$ nanowires than InAs nanowires.

We report on the self-catalysed growth of vertical InAs(1-x)P(x) nanowires on Si(111) substrates by solid-source molecular-beam epitaxy. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy revealed the mixed wurtzite and zincblende structure of the nanowires. Energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy and x-ray diffraction measurements were used to study the phosphorus content x in the InAs(1-x)P(x) nanowires, which was shown to be in the range 0-10 %. The dependence of phosphorus incorporation in the nanowires on the phosphorus flux in the growth chamber was investigated. The incorporation rate coefficients of As and P in InAs(1x)P(x) nanowires were found to be in the ratio 10 ± 5 to 1.

We investigate different processes for optimizing the formation of Ohmic contacts to InAs nanowires. The nanowires are grown via molecular beam epitaxy without the use of metal catalysts. Metallic contacts are attached to the nanowires by using an electron beam lithography process. Before deposition of the contacts, the InAs nanowires are treated either by wet etching in an ammonium polysulfide (NH(4))(2)S(x) solution or by an argon milling process in order to remove a surface oxide layer. Two-point electrical measurements show that the resistance of the ammonium polysulfide-treated nanowires is two orders of magnitude lower than that of the untreated nanowires. The nanowires that are treated by the argon milling process show a resistance which is more than an order of magnitude lower than that of those treated with ammonium polysulfide. Four-point measurements allow us to extract an upper bound of 1.4 × 10(-7) Ω cm(2) for the contact resistivity of metallic contacts on nanowires treated by the argon milling process.