Spatial carrier confinement in core-shell and multishell nanowire heterostructures.

Nduwimana, A; Musin, R N; Smith, A M; Wang, Xiao-Qian · Nano Lett · 2008

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

We have derived an analytical effective-mass model and employed first-principles density functional theory to study the spatial confinement of carriers in core-shell and multishell structured semiconductor nanowires. The band offset effect is analyzed based on the subband charge density distributions, which is strongly dependent upon the strain relaxation. First-principles calculation results for spatially confined Si/Ge and GaN/GaP nanowires indicate accumulation of a Ge-core hole gas and a GaN-core electron gas, respectively, in agreement with experimental observations.