| Semiconductor nanowires offer new opportunities to study physical phenomena in low-dimensional nanostructures. They also possess technologically useful properties for applications in electronics, optics, sensing, and thermoelectrics. Germanium nanowires are of particular interest, because of germanium's compatibility with standard silicon integrated circuit fabrication processes, its high electronic carrier mobilities, and the low temperature required for germanium nanowire growth. In this work, epitaxially-aligned germanium nanowires are grown on silicon substrates by chemical vapor deposition through the vapor-liquid-solid mechanism. Uniform nanowire diameters between 5 and 50 nm are obtained through the use of monodisperse gold colloids as catalysts. The crystallographic orientation of the nanowires, their strain, and their heteroepitaxial relationship with the substrate are characterized with transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and x-ray diffraction (XRD).A process for removing the gold catalysts from the tips of the germanium nanowires is demonstrated. Silicon shells are then heteroepitaxially deposited around the wires to fabricate radial heterostructures. These shells passivate the germanium nanowire surface, create electronic band offsets to confine holes away the surface where they can scatter or recombine, and induce strain which could allow for the engineering of properties such as band gap and carrier mobilities. However, analogous to planar heteroepitaxy, surface roughening and misfit dislocations can relax this strain. The effects of coaxial dimensions on strain relaxation in these structures are analyzed quantitatively by TEM and synchrotron XRD, and these results are related to continuum elasticity models. Lessons learned generated two successful strategies for synthesizing coherent core-shell nanowires with large misfit strain: chlorine surface passivation and growth of nanowires with low-energy sidewall facets. Both approaches avoid the strain-induced surface roughening that promotes dislocation nucleation. Metastably strained, dislocation-free core-shell nanowires are obtained. Axial strains in oriented core-shell nanowire arrays are measured and compared to predictions from elasticity theory. |
