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ARTICLES IN THE BOOK

  1. Atomic force microscope
  2. Atomic nanoscope
  3. Atom probe
  4. Ballistic conduction
  5. Bingel reaction
  6. Biomimetic
  7. Bio-nano generator
  8. Bionanotechnology
  9. Break junction
  10. Brownian motor
  11. Bulk micromachining
  12. Cantilever
  13. Carbon nanotube
  14. Carbyne
  15. CeNTech
  16. Chemical Compound Microarray
  17. Cluster
  18. Colloid
  19. Comb drive
  20. Computronium
  21. Coulomb blockade
  22. Diamondoids
  23. Dielectrophoresis
  24. Dip Pen Nanolithography
  25. DNA machine
  26. Ecophagy
  27. Electrochemical scanning tunneling microscope
  28. Electron beam lithography
  29. Electrospinning
  30. Engines of Creation
  31. Exponential assembly
  32. Femtotechnology
  33. Fermi point
  34. Fluctuation dissipation theorem
  35. Fluorescence interference contrast microscopy
  36. Fullerene
  37. Fungimol
  38. Gas cluster ion beam
  39. Grey goo
  40. Hacking Matter
  41. History of nanotechnology
  42. Hydrogen microsensor
  43. Inorganic nanotube
  44. Ion-beam sculpting
  45. Kelvin probe force microscope
  46. Lab-on-a-chip
  47. Langmuir-Blodgett film
  48. LifeChips
  49. List of nanoengineering topics
  50. List of nanotechnology applications
  51. List of nanotechnology topics
  52. Lotus effect
  53. Magnetic force microscope
  54. Magnetic resonance force microscopy
  55. Mechanochemistry
  56. Mechanosynthesis
  57. MEMS thermal actuator
  58. Mesotechnology
  59. Micro Contact Printing
  60. Microelectromechanical systems
  61. Microfluidics
  62. Micromachinery
  63. Molecular assembler
  64. Molecular engineering
  65. Molecular logic gate
  66. Molecular manufacturing
  67. Molecular motors
  68. Molecular recognition
  69. Molecule
  70. Nano-abacus
  71. Nanoart
  72. Nanobiotechnology
  73. Nanocar
  74. Nanochemistry
  75. Nanocomputer
  76. Nanocrystal
  77. Nanocrystalline silicon
  78. Nanocrystal solar cell
  79. Nanoelectrochemistry
  80. Nanoelectrode
  81. Nanoelectromechanical systems
  82. Nanoelectronics
  83. Nano-emissive display
  84. Nanoengineering
  85. Nanoethics
  86. Nanofactory
  87. Nanoimprint lithography
  88. Nanoionics
  89. Nanolithography
  90. Nanomanufacturing
  91. Nanomaterial based catalyst
  92. Nanomedicine
  93. Nanomorph
  94. Nanomotor
  95. Nano-optics
  96. Nanoparticle
  97. Nanoparticle tracking analysis
  98. Nanophotonics
  99. Nanopore
  100. Nanoprobe
  101. Nanoring
  102. Nanorobot
  103. Nanorod
  104. Nanoscale
  105. Nano-Science Center
  106. Nanosensor
  107. Nanoshell
  108. Nanosight
  109. Nanosocialism
  110. Nanostructure
  111. Nanotechnology
  112. Nanotechnology education
  113. Nanotechnology in fiction
  114. Nanotoxicity
  115. Nanotube
  116. Nanovid microscopy
  117. Nanowire
  118. National Nanotechnology Initiative
  119. Neowater
  120. Niemeyer-Dolan technique
  121. Ormosil
  122. Photolithography
  123. Picotechnology
  124. Programmable matter
  125. Quantum dot
  126. Quantum heterostructure
  127. Quantum point contact
  128. Quantum solvent
  129. Quantum well
  130. Quantum wire
  131. Richard Feynman
  132. Royal Society's nanotech report
  133. Scanning gate microscopy
  134. Scanning probe lithography
  135. Scanning probe microscopy
  136. Scanning tunneling microscope
  137. Scanning voltage microscopy
  138. Self-assembled monolayer
  139. Self-assembly
  140. Self reconfigurable
  141. Self-Reconfiguring Modular Robotics
  142. Self-replication
  143. Smart dust
  144. Smart material
  145. Soft lithography
  146. Spent nuclear fuel
  147. Spin polarized scanning tunneling microscopy
  148. Stone Wales defect
  149. Supramolecular assembly
  150. Supramolecular chemistry
  151. Supramolecular electronics
  152. Surface micromachining
  153. Surface plasmon resonance
  154. Synthetic molecular motors
  155. Synthetic setae
  156. Tapping AFM
  157. There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom
  158. Transfersome
  159. Utility fog

 



NANOTECHNOLOGY
This article is from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanowire

All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_the_GNU_Free_Documentation_License 

Nanowire

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

A nanowire is a wire of dimensions of the order of a nanometer (10−9 meters). Alternatively, nanowires can be defined as structures that have a lateral size constrained to tens of nanometers or less and an unconstrained longitudinal size. At these scales, quantum mechanical effects are important — hence such wires are also known as "quantum wires". Many different types of nanowires exist, including metallic (e.g., Ni, Pt, Au), semiconducting (e.g., InP, Si, GaN, etc.), and insulating (e.g., SiO2,TiO2). Molecular nanowires are composed of repeating molecular units either organic (e.g. DNA) or inorganic (e.g. Mo6S9-xIx).

The nanowires could be used, in the near future, to link tiny components into extremely smallcircuits. Using nanotechnology, such components could be created out of chemical compounds.

Overview

Typical nanowires exhibit aspect ratios (the ratio between length to width) of 1000 or more. As such they are often referred to as 1-Dimensional materials. Nanowires have many interesting properties that are not seen in bulk or 3-D materials. This is because electrons in nanowires are quantum confined laterally and thus occupy energy levels that are different from the traditional continuum of energy levels or bands found in bulk materials. Peculiar features of this quantum confinement exhibited by certain nanowires such as carbon nanotubes mainfest themselves in discrete values of the electrical conductance. Such discrete values arise from a quantum mechanical restraint on the number of electrons that can travel through the wire at the nanometer scale. These discrete values are often referred to as the quantum of conductance and are integer values of \frac{2e^2}{h} ≈ 12.9 kΩ-1. They are inverse of the well-known resistance unit h/e², which is roughly equal to 25812.8 ohms, and referred to as the von Klitzing constant RK (after Klaus von Klitzing, the discoverer of exact quantization). Since 1990, a fixed conventional value RK-90 is accepted.

Examples of nanowires include inorganic molecular nanowires (Mo6S9-xIx), which have a diameter of 0.9 nm, and can be hundreds of micrometers long. Other important examples are based on semiconductors such as InP, Si, GaN, etc., dielectrics (e.g. SiO2,TiO2), or metals (e.g. Ni, Pt).

There are many applications where nanowires may become important in electronic, opto-electronic and nanoelectromechanical devices, as additives in advanced composites, for metallic interconnects in quantum devices, as field-emittors and as leads for biomolecular nanosensors.

Physics of nanowires

Production of nanowires

Nanowires are not observed spontaneously in nature and must be produced in a laboratory. Nanowires can be either suspended, deposited or synthesized from the elements.

A suspended nanowire is a wire in vacuum chamber held at the extremities. A deposited nanowire is a wire deposited on a surface of different nature: e.g. it could even be a single strip of metallic atoms over a non-conducting surface.

A suspended nanowire can be produced by chemical etching of a bigger wire, or bombarding a bigger wire with some highly energetic particles (atoms or molecules).

Another way to produce a suspended nanowire is to indent the tip of an STM in the surface, of a metal near the melting point, and retract it. This can form a wire very much like the tip of a fork does with the cheese of a pizza.

A common technique for creating a nanowire is the Vapor-Liquid-Solid (VLS) synthesis method. This technique uses as source material either laser ablated particles or a feed gas (such as silane). The source is then exposed to a catalyst. For nanowires, the best catalysts are liquid metal (such as gold) nanoclusters, which can either be purchased in colloidal form and deposited on a substrate or self-assembled from a thin film by dewetting. This process can often produce crystalline nanowires in the case of semiconductor materials.

The source enters these nanoclusters and begins to saturate it. Once supersaturation is reached, the source solidifies and grows outward from the nanocluster. The final product's length can be adjusted by simply turning off the source. Compound nanowires with super-lattices of alternating materials can be created by switching sources while still in the growth phase.

Conductivity of nanowires

The conductivity of a nanowire is expected to be much less than that of the corresponding bulk material. This is due to a variety of reasons. First, there is scattering from the wire boundaries, when the wire width is below the free electron mean free path of the bulk material. In copper, for example, the mean free path is 40 nm. Nanowires less than 40 nm wide will shorten the mean free path to the wire width.

Nanowires also show other peculiar electrical properties due to their size. Unlike carbon nanotubes, whose motion of electrons can fall under the regime of ballistic transport (meaning the electrons can travel freely from one electrode to the other), nanowire conductivity is strongly influenced by edge effects. The edge effects come from atoms that lay at the nanowire surface and are not fully bonded to neighboring atoms like the atoms within the bulk of the nanowire. The unbonded atoms are often a source of defects within the nanowire, and may cause the nanowire to conduct electricity more poorly than the bulk material. As a nanowire shrinks in size, the surface atoms becomes more numerous compared to the atoms within the nanowire, and edge effects become more important.

Furthermore the conductivity can undergo a quantization in energy: i.e. the energy of the electrons going through a nanowire can assume only discrete values, multiple of the Von Klitzing constant G = 2e2 / h (where e is the charge of the electron and h is Planck's constant).

The conductivity is hence described as the sum of the transport by separate channels of different quantized energy levels. The thinner the wire is, the smaller the number of channels available to the transport of electrons.

The conductivity of a nanowire can be studied suspending it between two electrodes. This has been proven by measuring the conductivity of a nanowire while pulling it: while it shrinks, its conductivity decreases in a stepwise fashion and the plateaus correspond to multiples of G.

The quantized conductivity is more pronounced in semiconductors like Si or GaAs than in metals, due to lower electron density and lower effective mass. Quantized conductance can be observed in 25 nm wide silicon fins (Tilke et. al., 2003), resulting in increased threshold voltage.

Structure of nanowires

The nanowires can show peculiar shapes. Sometimes they can show noncrystalline order, assuming e.g. a pentagonal symmetry or a helicoidal (spiral) shape. Electrons zigzag along pentagonal tubes and spiral along helicoidal tubes.

The lack of crystalline order is due to the fact that a nanowire is periodic only in one dimension (along its axis). Hence it can assume any order in the other directions (in plane) if this is energetically favorable.

E.g., in some cases nanowires can show a fivefold symmetry, usually not observed in nature, but for clusters of few atoms. The fivefold symmetry is equivalent to the icosahedral symmetry of (small) atomic clusters: the icosahedron is often an energetically favorable shape for cluster of few atoms, but icosahedral ordering is not observed in crystals since it is not possible to stack together icosahedra (repeating infinite copies of them in each direction) and tile the whole space (fill it without holes).

Use of nanowires

Nanowires still belong to the experimental world of laboratories. However, some early experiments have shown how they can be used to build the next generation of computing devices.

To create active electronic elements, the first key step was to chemically dope a semiconductor nanowire. This has already been done to individual nanowires to create p-type and n-type semiconductors.

The next step was to find a way to create a p-n junction, one of the simplest electronic devices. This was achieved in two ways. The first way was to physically cross a p-type wire over an n-type wire. The second method involved chemically doping a single wire with different dopants along the length. This method created a p-n junction with only one wire.

After p-n junctions were built with nanowires, the next logical step was to build logic gates. By connecting several p-n junctions together, researchers have been able to create the basis of all logic circuits: the AND, OR, and NOT gates have all been built from semiconductor nanowire crossings.

It's possible that semiconductor nanowire crossings will be important to the future of digital computing. Though there are other uses for nanowires beyond these, the only ones that actually take advantage of physics in the nanometer regime are electronic.

Nanotubes are being studied for use as photon ballistic waveguides as interconnects in quantum dot/quantum effect well photon logic arrays. Photons travel inside the tube, electrons travel on the outside shell.

When two nanotubes acting as photon waveguides cross each other the juncture acts as a quantum dot.

References

  • K. v. Klitzing, G. Dorda, and M. Pepper; Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 494-497 (1980)[1]
  • R. Landauer, J. Phys.: Cond. Matter 1, 8099 (1989) [2]
  • A. T. Tilke et. al., Physical Rev. B, vol. 68, 075311 (2003).

See also

  • inorganic nanotubes
  • nanotubes
  • nanotronics
  • nanobelt
  • Quantum Hall effect

External links

  • Original article on the Quantum Hall Effect: K. v. Klitzing, G. Dorda, and M. Pepper; Phys. Rev. Lett. 45, 494-497 (1980).
  • Nanowire Transistors Faster than Silicon
  • Strongest theoretical nanowire produced at Australia's University of Melbourne.
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