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Complete composition tunability of InGaN nanowires using a combinatorial approach

Nature Materials volume 6, pages 951–956 (2007)Cite this article

Abstract

The III nitrides have been intensely studied in recent years because of their huge potential for everything from high-efficiency solid-state lighting and photovoltaics to high-power and temperature electronics1,2,3. In particular, the InGaN ternary alloy is of interest for solid-state lighting and photovoltaics because of the ability to tune the direct bandgap of this material from the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared region. In an effort to synthesize InGaN nitride, researchers have tried many growth techniques4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. Nonetheless, there remains considerable difficulty in making high-quality InGaN films and/or freestanding nanowires with tunability across the entire range of compositions. Here we report for the first time the growth of single-crystalline InxGa1−xN nanowires across the entire compositional range from x=0 to 1; the nanowires were synthesized by low-temperature halide chemical vapour deposition9 and were shown to have tunable emission from the near-ultraviolet to the near-infrared region. We propose that the exceptional composition tunability is due to the low process temperature and the ability of the nanowire morphology to accommodate strain-relaxed growth14, which suppresses the tendency toward phase separation that plagues the thin-film community.

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Figure 1: Experimental set-up.
Figure 2: Wire morphology and XRD at varying InGaN composition.
Figure 3: TEM characterization of the InGaN nanowires.
Figure 4: Optical characterization of the InGaN nanowires.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the US Department of Energy and DARPA-UPR. Work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was supported by the Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Science of the US Department of Energy. We thank T. Umbach, P. Pauzauskie and S.-Y. Bae for discussion, and the National Center for Electron Microscopy for the use of microscope facilities.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Tevye Kuykendall, Philipp Ulrich & Peidong Yang

  2. Materials Science Division, Molecular Foundry, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA

    Shaul Aloni & Peidong Yang

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  1. Tevye Kuykendall
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  2. Philipp Ulrich
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Correspondence to Peidong Yang.

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Kuykendall, T., Ulrich, P., Aloni, S. et al. Complete composition tunability of InGaN nanowires using a combinatorial approach. Nature Mater 6, 951–956 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat2037

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