The Electronic Structure and Transmission Characteristics of Disordered AlGaAs Nanowires

Perfect nanowires may be studied from both the bandstructure and transmission perspectives, and relating features in one set of curves to those in another often yields much insight into their behavior. For random-alloy nanowires, however, only transmission characteristics and virtual-crystal approxi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on nanotechnology 2007-01, Vol.6 (1), p.43-47
Main Authors: Boykin, T.B., Luisier, M., Schenk, A., Kharche, N., Klimeck, G.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alloying additive
Aluminum alloys
Aluminum gallium arsenides
Approximation
Bands
Computer networks
Condensed matter: electronic structure, electrical, magnetic, and optical properties
Disorders
Electron states and collective excitations in thin films, multilayers, quantum wells, mesoscopic and nanoscale systems
Electronic structure and electrical properties of surfaces, interfaces, thin films and low-dimensional structures
Exact sciences and technology
Fluctuation
Fluctuations
Gallium alloys
Intelligent networks
Laboratories
Mathematical analysis
Nanostructures
Nanotechnology
Nanowires
Physics
Propulsion
quantum effect semiconductor devices
Quantum wires
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Summary:Perfect nanowires may be studied from both the bandstructure and transmission perspectives, and relating features in one set of curves to those in another often yields much insight into their behavior. For random-alloy nanowires, however, only transmission characteristics and virtual-crystal approximation (VCA) bands have been available. This is a serious shortcoming since the VCA cannot properly capture disorder at the primitive cell level: those bulk properties which it can satisfactorily reproduce arise from spatially extended states and measurements which average out primitive cell-level fluctuations. Here we address this deficiency by projecting approximate bands out of supercell states for Al 0.15 Ga 0.85 As random alloy nanowires. The resulting bands correspond to the transmission characteristics very closely, unlike the VCA bands, which cannot explain important transmission features. Using both bandstructure and transmission results, we are better able to explain the operation of these nanowires
ISSN:1536-125X
1941-0085
DOI:10.1109/TNANO.2006.886776