The use of a tantalum wire in Hot-Wire Chemical Vapour Deposition has allowed the deposition of dense nanocrystalline silicon at low filament temperatures (1550oC). A transition in crystalline preferential orientation from (220) to (111) was observed around 1700oC. Transmission Electron Microscopy images, together with Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometry measurements, suggested that no oxidation oc...

We develop the plasmon-pole approximation for an interacting electron gas confined in a semiconductor quantum wire. We argue that the plasmon-pole approximation becomes a more accurate approach in quantum wire systems than in higher dimensional systems because of severe phase-space restrictions on particle-hole excitations in one dimension. As examples, we use the plasmon-pole approximation to ...

Recent observation of zero bias conductance peaks in semiconductor wire/superconductor heterostructures has generated great interest, and it is in hot debate if the observation is associated with Majorana fermions (MFs). Here we study the local and crossed Andreev reflections in a junction of two normal leads and a sand­ wiched superconductor­ semiconductor wire with two spatially separated but...