Thursday, January 18, 2007

This week in cond-mat

One paper this week, because real life continues to kick my butt.

cond-mat/0701119 - Minot et al., Single quantum dot nanowire LEDs
This is a really nice example of how impressively refined semiconductor nanowire growth has become. By carefully varying the growth conditions and precursors, the composition of growing InP nanowires can be tailored to form a single wire with a p-doped InP lead, an n-doped InP lead, and an interaction region in between formed from InP(1-x)As(x), which has a smaller bandgap than either of the InP segments. The result is a single nanowire LED, potentially well-suited for single-photon emission experiments and the like. Since the whole active region is vastly smaller than the relevant wavelength, the surrounding medium is essentially free space, and screening is comparatively poor in such tiny 1d structures, quantum confinement and charging effects both play a role. Very pretty.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Looks like another Science or Nature, right?

Douglas Natelson said...

Well, it's not formatted correctly for Nature (meaning that the abstract paragraph isn't full of bibliographic references), and Science doesn't like it if the papers are on the arxiv before publication, so I'd guess "no". I could be wrong, though.

Anonymous said...

It was just published in Nano Letters (articles ASAP) a week or so ago...

http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/nalefd/asap/abs/nl062483w.html

-Sujit

Anonymous said...

Hm, that link ran over. How about this one.

Anonymous said...

i'd just like to give a bump for the physics content on your blog. i've been reading for several months now and noticed your political and social posts attract a lot more commentary. it's your space and you can blog how you want to, but...i'd like to encourage you to resist temptation and keep the focus on physics. there's a lot condmat people out there who'll eventually learn this is a legitimate place to discuss physics.

thanks.