No Arabic abstract
We study the electronic states of core multi-shell semiconductor nanowires, including the effect of strong magnetic fields. We show that the multi-shell overgrowth of a free-standing nanowire, together with the prismatic symmetry of the substrate, may induce quantum confinement of carriers in a set of quasi-1D quantum channels corresponding to the nanowire edges. Localization and inter-channel tunnel coupling are controlled by the curvature at the edges and the diameter of the underlying nanowire. We also show that a magnetic field may induce either Aharonov-Bohm oscillations of the energy levels in the axial configuration, or a dimensional transition of the quantum states from quasi-1D to Landau levels for fields normal to the axis. Explicit predictions are given for nanostructures based on GaAs, InAs, and InGaN with different symmetries.
The magneto-photoluminescence in modulation doped core-multishell nanowires is predicted as a function of photo-excitation intensity in non-perturbative transverse magnetic fields. We use a self-consistent field approach within the effective mass approximation to determine the photoexcited electron and hole populations, including the complex composition and anisotropic geometry of the nano-material. The evolution of the photoluminescence is analyzed as a function of i) photo-excitation power, ii) magnetic field intensity, iii) type of doping, and iv) anisotropy with respect to field orientation.
We predict inelastic light scattering spectra from electron collective excitations in a coaxial quantum well embedded in a core-multishell GaAs/AlGaAs nanowire. The complex composition, the hexagonal cross section and the remote doping of typical samples are explicitly included, and the free electron gas is obtained by a DFT approach. Inelastic light scattering cross sections due to charge and spin collective excitations belonging to quasi-1D and quasi-2D states, which coexist in such radial heterostructures, are predicted in the non-resonant approximation from a fully three-dimensional multi-subband TDDFT formalism. We show that collective excitations can be classified in azimuthal, radial and longitudinal excitations, according to the associated density fluctuations, and we suggest that their character can be exposed by specific spectral dispersion of inelastic light scattering along different planes of the heterostructure.
Time- and spectrally-resolved PL from a periodic array of InP/InAs/InP core-multishell nanowires is presented. InAs layer shows multipeak PL spectra. PL decay is nonexponential and very slow, with decay rate depending on energy.
Quantum wells in InAs/GaSb heterostructures can be tuned to a topological regime associated with the quantum spin Hall effect, which arises due to an inverted band gap and hybridized electron and hole states. Here, we investigate electron-hole hybridization and the fate of the quantum spin Hall effect in a quasi one-dimensional geometry, realized in a core-shell-shell nanowire with an insulator core and InAs and GaSb shells. We calculate the band structure for an infinitely long nanowire using $mathbf{k cdot p}$ theory within the Kane model and the envelope function approximation, then map the result onto a BHZ model which is used to investigate finite-length wires. Clearly, quantum spin Hall edge states cannot appear in the core-shell-shell nanowires which lack one-dimensional edges, but in the inverted band-gap regime we find that the finite-length wires instead host localized states at the wire ends. These end states are not topologically protected, they are four-fold degenerate and split into two Kramers pairs in the presence of potential disorder along the axial direction. However, there is some remnant of the topological protection of the quantum spin Hall edge states in the sense that the end states are fully robust to (time-reversal preserving) angular disorder, as long as the bulk band gap is not closed.
Sub-gap states in semiconducting-superconducting nanowire hybrid devices are controversially discussed as potential topologically non-trivial quantum states. One source of ambiguity is the lack of an energetically and spatially well defined tunnel spectrometer. Here, we use quantum dots directly integrated into the nanowire during the growth process to perform tunnel spectroscopy of discrete sub-gap states in a long nanowire segment. In addition to sub-gap states with a standard magnetic field dependence, we find topologically trivial sub-gap states that are independent of the external magnetic field, i.e. that are pinned to a constant energy as a function of field. We explain this effect qualitatively and quantitatively by taking into account the strong spin-orbit interaction in the nanowire, which can lead to a decoupling of Andreev bound states from the field due to a spatial spin texture of the confined eigenstates.