Semiconductivity Transition in Silicon Nanowires by Hole Transport Layer

The surface of nanowires is a source of interest mainly for electrical prospects. Thus, different surface chemical treatments were carried out to develop recipes to control the surface effect. In this work, we succeed in shifting and tuning the semiconductivity of a Si nanowire-based device from n- to p-type. This was accomplished by generating a hole transport layer at the surface by using an electrochemical reaction-based nonequilibrium position to enhance the impact of the surface charge transfer. This was completed by applying different annealing pulses at low temperature (below 400 °C) to reserve the hydrogen bonds at the surface. After each annealing pulse, the surface was characterized by XPS, Kelvin probe measurements, and conductivity measured by FET based on a single Si NW. The mechanism and conclusion were supported experimentally and theoretically. To this end, this strategy has been demonstrated as an essential tool which could pave a new road for regulating semiconductivity and for other low-dimensional nanomaterials.
M.B. is thankful for the MAOF Grant from the Council for Higher Education in Israel for new faculty members. A.S. is appreciative of the institutional scholarships for Ph.D. students that they received from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. W.W. is thankful for the fundamental research funds from the Central Universities (JC2002). L.Z. is thankful for the support of a postdoctoral fellowship from the Jacob Blaustein Center for Scientific Cooperation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61904134), and the National Natural Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province (2019JQ-291). The computing resources and the related technical support used for this work have been provided by CRESCO/ENEAGRID High Performance Computing infrastructure and its staff, along with additional support from S. Migliori and S. Giusepponi. E.N.E.A. acknowledges funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 824158 (EoCoE-II). J.A. acknowledges funding from Generalitat de Catalunya 2017 SGR 327 and the Spanish MINECO coordinated project ENE2017-85087-C3. ICN2 is supported by the Severo Ochoa program from Spanish MINECO (SEV-2017-0706) and is funded by the CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya.