A comparative analysis of experimental data on electron transport in Si (100) MOSFETs in the region of high mobilities and strong electronelectron interaction is carried out. It is shown that electrons can be described by the model of a noninteracting gas with the renormalized mass and Lande factor, which allows experimentally verifiable predictions.
Epitaxial graphene films were grown in vacuo by silicon sublimation from the (0001) and (000-1) faces of 4H- and 6H-SiC. Hall effect mobilities and sheet carrier densities of the films were measured at 300 K and 77 K and the data depended on the growth face. About 40% of the samples exhibited holes as the dominant carrier, independent of face. Generally, mobilities increased with decreasing carrier density, independent of carrier type and substrate polytype. The contributions of scattering mechanisms to the conductivities of the films are discussed. The results suggest that for near-intrinsic …
We report on a theoretical study of quantum charge transport in atomistic models of silicon nanowires with surface roughness-based disorder. Depending on the nanowires features (length, roughness profile) various conduction regimes are explored numerically by using efficient real space order N computational approaches of both Kubo-Greenwood and Landauer-Buttiker transport frameworks. Quantitative estimations of the elastic mean free paths, charge mobilities and localization lengths are performed as a function of the correlation length of the surface roughness disorder. The obtained values for …
Carbon-doped high mobility two-dimensional hole gases grown on (110) oriented GaAs substrates have been grown with hole mobilities exceeding 10^6 cm^2/Vs in single heterojunction GaAs/AlGaAs structures. At these high mobilities, a pronounced mobility anisotropy has been observed. Rashba induced spin-splitting in these asymmetric structures has been found to be independent on the transport direction.
We have fabricated and characterized a field-effect transistor in which an electric field is applied through an encapsulated vacuum cavity and induces a two-dimensional electron system on a hydrogen-passivated Si(111) surface. This vacuum cavity preserves the ambient sensitive surface and is created via room temperature contact bonding of two Si substrates. Hall measurements are made on the H-Si(111) surface prepared in aqueous ammonium fluoride solution. We obtain electron densities up to $6.5 \times 10^{11}$ cm$^{-2}$ and peak mobilities of $\sim 8000$ cm$^{2}$/V s at 4.2 K.
In this work, double-gated field effect transistors manufactured from monolayer graphene are investigated. Conventional top-down CMOS-compatible processes are applied except for graphene deposition by manual exfoliation. Carrier mobilities in single- and double gated graphene field effect transistors are compared. Even in double-gated graphene FETs, the carrier mobility exceeds the universal mobility of silicon over nearly the entire measured range. At comparable dimensions, reported mobilities for ultra thin body silicon-on-insulator MOSFETs can not compete with graphene FET values.
We present a conceptually simple method for treating electron-phonon scattering and phonon limited mobilities. By combining Green's function based transport calculations and molecular dynamics (MD), we obtain a temperature dependent transmission from which we evaluate the mobility. We validate our approach by comparing to mobilities and conductivies obtained by the Boltzmann transport equation (BTE) for different bulk and one-dimensional systems. For bulk silicon and gold we successfully compare against experimental values. We discuss limitations and advantages of each of the computational app…
Improving carrier mobilities of two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors is highly sought after. Recently, Ng. et al. [1] reported rippled molybdenum disulfide (MoS$_2$) transistors on bulged silicon nitride (SiN$_x$) substrates that exhibit high electron mobilities up to ~900 cm$^2$V$^{-1}$s$^{-1}$. The high mobility values were attributed to the suppression of electron-phonon scattering by the lattice distortion in the rippled MoS$_2$ channel. While the results are compelling, this Matters Arising shows that the mobility values in ref. [1] are likely to be overestimated due to invasive voltage pr…
In this letter, a top-gated field effect device (FED) manufactured from monolayer graphene is investigated. Except for graphene deposition, a conventional top-down CMOS-compatible process flow is applied. Carrier mobilities in graphene pseudo-MOS structures are compared to those obtained from top-gated Graphene-FEDs. The extracted values exceed the universal mobility of silicon and silicon-on-insulator MOSFETs.
Graphene is generally considered to be a strong candidate to succeed silicon as an electronic material. However, to date, it actually has not yet demonstrated capabilities that exceed standard semiconducting materials. Currently demonstrated viable graphene devices are essentially limited to micron size ultrahigh frequency analog field effect transistors and quantum Hall effect devices for metrology. Nanoscopically patterned graphene tends to have disordered edges that severely reduce mobilities thereby obviating its advantage over other materials. Here we show that graphene grown on structure…
Intrinsic electron- and hole-phonon interactions are investigated in monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides MX$_2$ (M=Mo,W; X=S,Se) based on a density functional theory formalism. Due to their structural similarities, all four materials exhibit qualitatively comparable scattering characteristics with the acoustic phonons playing a dominant role near the conduction and valence band extrema at the K point. However, substantial differences are observed quantitatively leading to disparate results in the transport properties. Of the considered, WS$_2$ provides the best performance for both elec…
We present an electron spin resonance (ESR) approach to characterize shallow electron trapping in band-tail states at Si/SiO2 interfaces in metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices and demonstrate it on two MOS devices fabricated at different laboratories. Despite displaying similar low temperature (4.2 K) peak mobilities, our ESR data reveal a significant difference in the Si/SiO2 interface quality of these two devices, specifically an order of magnitude difference in the number of shallow trapped charges at the Si/SiO2 interfaces. Thus, our ESR method allows a quantitative evaluation of the S…
The influence of local oxidation in silicon nanowires on hole transport, and hence the effect of varying the oxidation state of silicon atoms at the wire surface, is studied using density functional theory in conjunction with a Green's function scattering method. For silicon nanowires with growth direction along [110] and diameters of a few nanometers, it is found that the introduction of oxygen bridging and back bonds does not significantly degrade hole transport for voltages up to several hundred millivolts relative to the valence band edge. As a result, the mean free paths are comparable to…
Graphene-like two-dimensional (2D) materials, not only are interesting for their exotic electronic structure and fundamental electronic transport or optical properties but also, hold promises for device miniaturization down to atomic thickness. As one material belonging to this category, InSe is not only a promising candidate for optoelectronic devices but also has potential for ultrathin field effect transistor (FET) with high mobility transport. In this work, various substrates such as PMMA, bare silicon oxide, passivated silicon oxide, and silicon nitride were used to fabricate multi-layer …
We study the effects of charged impurity scattering on the electronic transport properties of <110>-oriented Si nanowires in a gate-all-around geometry, where the impurity potential is screened by the gate, gate oxide and conduction band electrons. The electronic structure of the doped nanowires is calculated with a tight-binding method and the transport properties with a Landauer-Buttiker Green functions approach and the linearized Boltzmann transport equation (LBTE) in the first Born approximation. Based on our numerical results we argue that: (1) There are large differences between Phosphor…
Using the effective mass theory and the multi-valley envelope function representation, we have developed a theoretical framework for computing the single-electron electronic structure of several phosphorus donors interacting in an arbitrary geometrical configuration in silicon taking into account the valley-orbit coupling. The methodology is applied to three coupled phosphorus donors, arranged in a linear chain and in a triangle, and to six donors arranged in a regular hexagon. The results of the simulations evidence that the valley composition of the single-electron states strongly depends on…
We demonstrate the injection of pure valley-orbit currents in multi-valley semiconductors and present the theory of this effect. We studied photo-induced transport in $n$-doped (111)-oriented silicon metal-oxide-semiconductor field effect transistors at room temperature. By shining circularly polarized light on exact oriented structures with six equivalent valleys, non-zero electron fluxes within each valley are generated, which compensate each other and do not yield a net electric current. By disturbing the balance between the valley fluxes, in this work by applying linearly polarized radiati…
We compute both electron- and phonon transmissions in thin disordered silicon nanowires. Our atomistic approach is based on tight-binding and empirical potential descriptions of the electronic and phononic systems, respectively. Surface disorder is modeled by including surface silicon vacancies. It is shown that the average phonon- and electron transmissions through long SiNWs containing many vacancies can be accurately estimated from the scattering properties of the isolated vacancies using a recently proposed averaging method [Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 076803 (2007)]. We apply this averaging meth…
Electronic band structure and energetic stability of two types of and oriented silicon nanowires in beta-Sn phase with the surface terminated by hydrogen atoms were studied using density functional theory. It was found that beta-Sn nanowires are metastable with zero band gap against to alpha-diamond nanowires. The relative energy of the studied wires tends to the energy of the bulk silicon crystal in beta-Sn phase.
The current-induced spin polarization and momentum-dependent spin-orbit field were measured in In$_{x}$Ga$_{1-x}$As epilayers with varying indium concentrations and silicon doping densities. Samples with higher indium concentrations and carrier concentrations and lower mobilities were found to have larger electrical spin generation efficiencies. Furthermore, current-induced spin polarization was detected in GaAs epilayers despite the absence of measurable spin-orbit fields, indicating that the extrinsic contributions to the spin polarization mechanism must be considered. Theoretical calculatio…
One of the fundamental properties of semiconductors is their ability to support highly tunable electric currents in the presence of electric fields or carrier concentration gradients. These properties are described by transport coefficients such as electron and hole mobilities. Recently, advances in electronic structure methods for real materials have made it possible to study these properties with predictive accuracy and without resorting to empirical parameters. Here, we review the most recent developments in the area of ab initio calculations of carrier mobilities of semiconductors. In the …
Wave effects of phonons can give rise to controllability of heat conduction beyond that by particle scattering at surfaces and interfaces. In this work, we propose a new class of 3D nanostructure: a silicon-nanowire-cage (SiNWC) structure consisting of silicon nanowires (SiNWs) connected by nano-cross-junctions (NCJs). We perform equilibrium molecular dynamics (MD) simulations, and find an ultralow value of thermal conductivity of SiNWC, 0.173 Wm-1K-1, which is one order lower than that of SiNWs. By further modal analysis and atomistic Green's function calculations, we identify that the large …
A wide variety of apparently contradictory piezoresistance (PZR) behaviors have been reported in p-type silicon nanowires (SiNW), from the usual positive bulk effect to anomalous (negative) PZR and giant PZR. The origin of such a range of diverse phenomena is unclear, and consequently so too is the importance of a number of parameters including SiNW type (top down or bottom up), stress concentration, electrostatic field effects, or surface chemistry. Here we observe all these PZR behaviors in a single set of nominally p-type, $\langle 110 \rangle$ oriented, top-down SiNWs at uniaxial tensile s…
Two-dimensional (2D) semiconductors have been proposed for heterogeneous integration with existing silicon technology; however, their chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth temperatures are often too high. Here, we demonstrate direct CVD solid-source precursor synthesis of continuous monolayer (1L) MoS$_2$ films at 560 C in 50 min, within the 450-to-600 C, 2 h thermal budget window required for back-end-of-the-line compatibility with modern silicon technology. Transistor measurements reveal on-state current up to ~140 $\mathrm{μA/μm}$ at 1 V drain-to-source voltage for 100 nm channel lengths, …
The general theory for quantum simulation of cubic semiconductor n-MOSFETs is presented within the effective mass equation approach. The full three-dimensional transport problem is described in terms of coupled transverse subband modes which arise due to quantum confinement along the body thickness direction. Couplings among the subbands are generated for two reasons: due to spatial variations of the confinement potential along the transport direction, and due to non-alignment of the device coordinate system with the principal axes of the constant energy conduction band ellipsoids. The problem…
We report on the circular and linear photogalvanic effects caused by free-carrier absorption of terahertz radiation in electron channels on (001)-oriented and miscut silicon surfaces. The photocurrent behavior upon variation of the radiation polarization state, wavelength, gate voltage and temperature is studied. We present the microscopical and phenomenological theory of the photogalvanic effects, which describes well the experimental results. In particular, it is demonstrated that the circular (photon-helicity sensitive) photocurrent in silicon-based structures is of pure orbital nature orig…
The influence of interface roughness scattering (IRS) on the performances of silicon nanowire field-effect transistors (NWFETs) is numerically investigated using a full 3D quantum transport simulator based on the atomistic sp3d5s* tight-binding model. The interface between the silicon and the silicon dioxide layers is generated in a real-space atomistic representation using an experimentally derived autocovariance function (ACVF). The oxide layer is modeled in the virtual crystal approximation (VCA) using fictitious SiO2 atoms. <110>-oriented nanowires with different diameters and randomly gen…
The past decade has seen rapid growth in the research area of graphene and its application to novel electronics. With Moore's law beginning to plateau, the need for post-silicon technology in industry is becoming more apparent. Moreover, existing technology is insufficient for implementing terahertz detectors and receivers, which are required for a number of applications including medical imaging and security scanning. Graphene is considered to be a key potential candidate for replacing silicon in existing CMOS technology as well as realizing field effect transistors for terahertz detection, d…
Inspired by the challenge of scaling up existing silicon quantum hardware, we investigate compilation strategies for sparsely-connected 2d qubit arrangements and propose a spin-qubit architecture with minimal compilation overhead. Our architecture is based on silicon nanowire split-gate transistors which can form finite 1d chains of spin-qubits and allow the execution of two-qubit operations such as Swap gates among neighbors. Adding to this, we describe a novel silicon junction which can couple up to four nanowires into 2d arrangements via spin shuttling and Swap operations. Given these hardw…
In silicon quantum dots (QDs), at a certain magnetic field commonly referred to as the "hot spot", the electron spin relaxation rate (T_1^(-1)) can be drastically enhanced due to strong spin-valley mixing. Here, we experimentally find that with a valley splitting of 78.2 ${\pm}$ 1.6 $μ$eV, this hot spot in spin relaxation can be suppressed by more than 2 orders of magnitude when the in-plane magnetic field is oriented at an optimal angle, about 9° from the [100] sample plane. This directional anisotropy exhibits a sinusoidal modulation with a 180° periodicity. We explain the magnitude and phas…
Bandstructure effects in the electronic transport of strongly quantized silicon nanowire field-effect-transistors (FET) in various transport orientations are examined. A 10-band sp3d5s* semi-empirical atomistic tight-binding model coupled to a self consistent Poisson solver is used for the dispersion calculation. A semi-classical, ballistic FET model is used to evaluate the current-voltage characteristics. It is found that the total gate capacitance is degraded from the oxide capacitance value by 30% for wires in all the considered transport orientations ([100], [110], [111]). Different wire d…
Interfacing solid-state defect electron spins to other quantum systems is an ongoing challenge. The ground-state spin's weak coupling to its environment bestows excellent coherence properties, but also limits desired drive fields. The excited-state orbitals of these electrons, however, can exhibit stronger coupling to phononic and electric fields. Here, we demonstrate electrically driven coherent quantum interference in the optical transition of single, basally oriented divacancies in commercially available 4H silicon carbide. By applying microwave frequency electric fields, we coherently driv…
Bandstructure effects in PMOS transport of strongly quantized silicon nanowire field-effect-transistors (FET) in various transport orientations are examined. A 20-band sp3d5s* spin-orbit-coupled (SO) atomistic tight-binding model coupled to a self consistent Poisson solver is used for the valence band dispersion calculation. A ballistic FET model is used to evaluate the capacitance and current-voltage characteristics. The dispersion shapes and curvatures are strong functions of device size, lattice orientation, and bias, and cannot be described within the effective mass approximation. The anis…
This paper describes a simple microwave apparatus to measure the Hall effect in semiconductor wafers. The advantage of this technique is that it does not require contacts on the sample or the use of a resonant cavity. Our method consists of placing the semiconductor wafer into a slot cut in an X-band (8 - 12 GHz) waveguide series tee, injecting microwave power into the two opposite arms of the tee, and measuring the microwave output at the third arm. A magnetic field applied perpendicular to the wafer gives a microwave Hall signal that is linear in the magnetic field and which reverses phase w…
We report on detailed room temperature and low temperature transport properties of double-gate Si MOSFETs with the Si well thickness in the range 7-17 nm. The devices were fabricated on silicon-on-insulator wafers utilizing wafer bonding, which enabled us to use heavily doped metallic back gate. We observe mobility enhancement effects at symmetric gate bias at room temperature, which is the finger print of the volume inversion/accumulation effect. An asymmetry in the mobility is detected at 300 K and at 1.6 K between the top and back interfaces of the Si well, which is interpreted to arise fro…
Under the challenge of growing a single bilayer of Bi oriented in the (111) crystallographic direction over amorphous substrates, we have studied different thicknesses of Bi thermally evaporated onto silicon oxide in order to shed light on the dominant atomic structures and their oxidation. We have employed atomic force microscope, X-ray diffraction, and scanning electron microscope approaches to demonstrate that Bi is crystalline and oriented in the (111) direction for thicknesses over 20 nm. Surprisingly, Raman spectroscopy indicates that the rhombohedral structure is preserved even for ultr…
