Ambipolar Transport in Narrow Bandgap Semiconductor InSb Nanowires

Abstract

We report on transport measurement study of top-gated field effect transistors made out of InSb nanowires grown by chemical vapor deposition. The transistors exhibit ambipolar transport characteristics revealed by three distinguished gate-voltage regions: In the middle region where the fermi level resides within the bandgap, the electrical resistance shows an exponential dependence on temperature and gate voltage. With either more positive or negative gate voltages, the devices enter the electron and hole transport regimes, revealed by a resistance decreasing linearly with decreasing temperature. From the transport measurement data of a 1-$\mu$m-long device made from a nanowire of 50 nm in diameter, we extract a bandgap energy of 190-220 meV. The off-state current of this device is found to be suppressed within the measurement noise at a temperature of T = 4 K. A shorter, 260-nm-long device is found to exhibit a finite off-state current and a hole, on-state, circumference-normalized current of 11 $\mu$A/$\mu$m at V${}_D$ = 50 mV which is the highest for such a device to our knowledge. The ambipolar transport characteristics make the InSb nanowires attractive for CMOS electronics, hybrid electron-hole quantum systems and hole based spin qubits.

arXiv comment13 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Signatures of Majorana fermions in hybrid superconductor-semiconductor nanowire devices
• Observation of Majorana Fermions in a Nb-InSb Nanowire-Nb Hybrid Quantum Device
• Spin Relaxation in Ge/Si Core-Shell Nanowire Qubits
• Electrical control over single hole spins in nanowire quantum dots
• Towards high mobility InSb nanowire devices
• Room Temperature Device Performance of Electrodeposited InSb Nanowire Field Effect Transistors
• Schottky barrier and contact resistance of InSb nanowire field effect transistors
• Electronic structures of [001]- and [111]-oriented InSb and GaSb free-standing nanowires