Surface guided growth of CdTe nanowires for narrow-bandgap applications

Semiconducting nanowires are potential components in nano technology. One of the limiting steps of their integration into devices is the need to align them on surfaces. Our group has established the growth of several horizontal semiconductor nanowires aligned by crystalline substrates with controlled crystallographic orientations. CdTe, a narrow band-gap II-VI semiconductor (~1.5 eV), attracts a lot of interest owing to its superior optical and electrical properties, which making it a promising material for solar cells and near IR photodetectors. Its hetero-structures with CdS, and alloys with mercury, known as MCT (Hg_xCd_1-xTe) are highly potential components for efficient PV cells and IR photodetectors respectively, as well as topological materials for quantum computing. Cation exchange is considered for obtaining intriguing guided 1D structures, such as MCT and the topological semimetal HgTe, based on CdTe crystalline structure. Those wires, which are hard to get conventionally, hopefully will be realized through complementary post growth treatment.