This project, carried out with VLS epitaxy support by Tom Picraux’s group at LANL, focused on fabricating and characterizing Si/Ge heteronanowire tunneling FETs, aiming to combine high on-state current in the Ge tunneling junction with suppressed off-state leakage current in the Si junction. This led to a state-of-the-art nanowire TFET prototype with sharp switching, as well as high room-temperature negative transconductance. This project also seeded work on heteronanowire arrays for photovoltaics, continued as a subsequent funded collaboration with Domenico Pacifici’s group at Brown.

Funding agencies:
NSF ECCS-1068895

Key students and post-docs:
Son Le (Brown PhD Physics 2013)
Peng Zhang (Brown PhD Physics 2016)