Nanosociety Meeting Friday @ 12:15pm, McCullough 115: Looking under the bed: a study of nanowire properties that are often ignored

Erik Garnett will be discussing his recent work (published in Nature Nanotechnology) about dopant profiling and surface analysis of Si nanowires. The talk will began at 12:15pm in McCullough 115. Pizza will be served. 

Looking under the bed: a study of nanowire properties that are often ignored

Erik Garnett

Material Science and Engineering

Postdoc in McGehee, Brongersma, and Cui Groups

Abstract

Nanowires have received tremendous research attention in the last decade and have been used to make solar cells, thermoelectrics, sensors, transistors, batteries and resonators, often with improved properties over bulk devices.  However, there has been very littlle attention given to characterizing the dopant distribution and surface state density, which are known to affect the electrical properties in bulk devices and should impact nanoscale devices even more due to the large surface to volume ratio.  The standard methods for extracting nanowire doping concentration from field effect transistors rely on several untested assumptions, while surface states are almost always ignored in calculations.  This talk will discuss capacitance-voltage measurements performed on individual silicon nanowires to extract the radial dopant distribution and surface state density.  The standard assumptions used in nanoelectronics research will be analyzed in the context of the capacitance-voltage measurement results.