Tag Archives: Changyong Lan

Nanowires with fast infrared light (IR) response and more

An April 10, 2019 news item on Nanowerk points the way to improved high-speed communication with nanowires (Note: A link has been removed),

Chinese scientists have synthesized new nanowires with high carrier mobility and fast infrared light (IR) response, which could help in high-speed communication. Their findings were published in Nature Communications (“Ultra-fast photodetectors based on high-mobility indium gallium antimonide nanowires”).

Below, you will find an image illustrating the researchers’ work ,

Caption: The growth mechanism and fast 1550 nm IR detection of the single-crystalline In0.28Ga0.72Sb ternary nanowires Credit: HAN Ning

An April 10, 2019 Chinese Academy of Sciences news release (also on EurekAlert), which originated the news item, provides more detail,

Nowadays, effective optical communications use 1550 nm IR, which is received and converted into an electrical signal for computer processing. Fast light-to-electrical conversion is thus essential for high-speed communications.

According to quantum theory, 1550 nm IR has energy of ~ 0.8 eV, and can only be detected by semiconductors with bandgaps lower than 0.8 eV, such as germanium (0.66 eV) and III-V compound materials such as InxGa1-xAs (0.35-1.42 eV) and InxGa1-xSb (0.17-0.73 eV). However, those materials usually have huge crystal defects, which cause substantial degradation of photoresponse performance.

Scientists from the Institute of Process Engineering (IPE) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, City University of Hong Kong (CityU) and their collaborators synthesized highly crystalline ternary In0.28Ga0.72Sb nanowires to demonstrate high carrier mobility and fast IR response.

In this study, the In0.28Ga0.72Sb nanowires (bandgap 0.69 eV) showed a high responsivity of 6000 A/W to IR with high response and decay times of 0.038ms and 0.053ms, respectively, which are some of the best times so far. The fast IR response speed can be attributed to the minimized crystal defects, as also illustrated by a high hole mobility of up to 200 cm2/Vs, according to Prof. Johnny C. Ho from CityU.

The minimized crystal defect is achieved by a “catalyst epitaxy technology” first established by Ho’s group. Briefly, the III-V compound nanowires are catalytically grown by a metal catalyst such as gold, nickel, etc.

“These catalyst nanoparticles play a key role in nanowire growth as the nanowires are synthesized layer by layer with the atoms well aligned with those in the catalyst,” said HAN Ning, a professor at IPE and senior author of the paper.

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Ultra-fast photodetectors based on high-mobility indium gallium antimonide nanowires by Dapan Li, Changyong Lan, Arumugam Manikandan, SenPo Yip, Ziyao Zhou, Xiaoguang Liang, Lei Shu, Yu-Lun Chueh, Ning Han & Johnny C. Ho. Nature Communicationsvolume 10, Article number: 1664 (2019) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-019-09606-y Published 10 April 2019

This paper is open access.