A simple route to synchronized nucleation of self-catalyzed GaAs nanowires on silicon for sub-Poissonian length distributions


A simple route to synchronized nucleation of self-catalyzed GaAs nanowires on silicon for sub-Poissonian length distributions

Tauchnitz, T.; Berdnikov, Y.; Dubrovskii, V. G.; Schneider, H.; Helm, M.; Dimakis, E.

We demonstrate a simple route to grow ensembles of self-catalyzed GaAs nanowires with a remarkably narrow statistical distribution of lengths on natively oxidized Si(111) substrates. The fitting of the nanowire length distribution with a theoretical model reveals that the key requirements for narrow length distributions are the synchronized nucleation of all nanowires on the substrate and the absence of beam shadowing from adjacent nanowires. Both requirements are fulfilled by controlling the size and number density of the openings in SiOx, where the nanowires nucleate. This is achieved by using a pre-growth treatment of the substrate with Ga droplets and two annealing cycles. The narrowest nanowire length distributions are markedly sub-Poissonian, which validates the theoretical predictions about temporally anti-correlated nucleation events in individual nanowires, the so-called nucleation antibunching. Finally, the reproducibility of sub-Poissonian length distributions attests the reliability of our growth method.

Keywords: substrate for nanowires; nucleation antibunching; nucleation delay; nanowire nucleation

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Permalink: https://www.hzdr.de/publications/Publ-28118
Publ.-Id: 28118