Engineering electronic functionalities in nanowire-based devices: advantages from heterostructuring and electrostatic doping

Semiconductor nanowires and nanowire heterostructures provide a formidable playground for nanoscience and nanotechnology at large, allowing to enable unprecedented device functionalities, that find countless applications spanning from quantum computation-technologies and sensing to energy harvesting and machine learning.
We build on the epitaxial growth of III-V semiconductor nanowires, and demonstrate prototypical nanowire-based devices that use different strategies for the electrostatic doping of the nanostructures.
Electronic confinement in InP-InAs nanowire quantum dots is exploited for thermoelectric conversion [1] and to enable single electron transistors coupled to microwaves [2]. Broken-gap InAs-GaSb core-shell nanowires allow to implement Esaki tunnel diodes [3] and open new perspectives for studying the physics of interacting electrons and holes at the nanoscale. Electric double layer transistors based on InAs nanowires gated by ionic liquids [4] enable the simultaneous gate-control of electrical conductivity and measurement of thermal conductivity in device architectures with suspended nanostructures [5].

[1] D. Prete, et al., Thermoelectric response at high temperature in nanowire quantum dots, Nano Lett. 19, 3033−3039 (2019)
[2] S. Cornia, et al., Microwave Assisted Tunneling in Hard-Wall InAs/InP Nanowire Quantum Dots, Scientific Report, 19523 (2019)
[3] M. Rocci, et al., Tunable Esaki effect in catalyst-free InAs/GaSb core-shell nanowires, Nano Letters 16, 7950–7955 (2016)
[4] J. Lieb, et al., Ionic liquid gating of InAs nanowire-based field effect transistors, Adv. Funct. Mater. 1804378 (2019)
[5] M. Rocci, et al, Suspended nanowire devices for thermal conductivity measurements using the 3ω-method, J. Mater. Eng. Perform. 27, 6299–6305 (2018)

Marco Affronte - marco.affronte@unimore.it