Controlling the properties of semiconductor/metal interfaces is a powerful method for designing functionality and improving the performance of electrical devices. Recently semiconductor/superconductor hybrids have appeared as an important example where the atomic scale uniformity of the interface plays a key role in determining the quality of the induced superconducting gap. Here we present epi...

We have developed specially designed semiconductor devices for the measurement of thermal conductance in suspended nanostructures. By means of a novel subtractive comparison, we are able to deduce the phonon thermal conductance of individual nanoscale beams of different geometry and dopant profiles. The separate roles of important phonon scattering mechanisms are analyzed and a quantitative est...

Zinc oxide (ZnO) is a promising wide band gap semiconductor. It has a direct energy band gap, Eg of 3.3eV at room temperature. ZnO can be alloyed with CdO and MgO to form the ternaries CdxZn1-xO and MgxZn1-xO, extending the direct energy band from 2.8eV to 4.0eV. Through proper doping, it also can be made transparent and conductive, piezoelectric, or ferromagnetic. ZnO based single crystal nano...

The typical photodetectors can only detect one specific optical spectral band, such as InGaAs and graphene-PbS quantum dots for near-infrared (NIR) light detection, CdS and Si for visible light detection, and ZnO and III-nitrides for UV light detection. So far, none of the developed photodetector can achieve the multicolor detection with arbitrary spectral selectivity, high sensitivity, high sp...

UV photodetectors have been investigated for various commercial and military applications, such as secure space-to-space communications, pollution monitoring, water sterilization, flame sensing, and early missile plume detection [1]. To date, epitaxially grown or bulk wide bandgap semiconductors such as GaN, AlN, AlGaN, C (diamond), and SiC have been used for ultraviolet detection [2–12]. Fabri...

We utilized a thermal radiation method to synthesize semiconducting hollow ZnO nanoballoons and metal-semiconductor concentric solid Zn/ZnO nanospheres from metallic solid Zn nanospheres. The chemical properties, crystalline structures, and photoluminescence mechanisms for the metallic solid Zn nanospheres, semiconducting hollow ZnO nanoballoons, and metal-semiconductor concentric solid Zn/ZnO ...

K. F. Karlsson,1,2 M. A. Dupertuis,1 D. Y. Oberli,1 E. Pelucchi,1 A. Rudra,1 P. O. Holtz,2 and E. Kapon1 1Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Laboratory of Physics of Nanostructures, CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland 2Department of Physics, Chemistry, and Biology (IFM), Semiconductor Materials, Linköping University, S-58183 Linköping, Sweden Received 8 August 2009; published 19 April 2010

In this tutorial we review recent progress in the design and growth of epitaxial semiconductor nanostructures in lattice-mismatched material systems. We focus on the Ge on Si model system after pointing out the similarities to III-V and other growth systems qualitatively as well as quantitatively. During material deposition, the first layers of the epitaxial film wet the surface before the form...

The electrical nature of the nanoscale contact between metal nanodots and semiconductor rods has drawn significant interest because of potential applications for metal-semiconductor hybrid nanostructures in energy conversion or heterogeneous catalysis. Here, we studied the nanoscale electrical character of the Pt/CdSe junction in Pt/CdSe/Pt nanodumbbells on connected Au islands by conductive-pr...

In this paper, we demonstrated the fabrication of one-dimensional (1D) and two-dimensional (2D) periodic nanostructures on III-V GaAs substrates utilizing laser direct writing (LDW) technique. Metal thin films (Ti) and phase change materials (Ge2Sb2Te5 (GST) and Ge2Sb1.8Bi0.2Te5 (GSBT)) were chosen as photoresists to achieve small feature sizes of semiconductor nanostructures. A minimum feature...