Electronic and optical properties of core-shell nanowires in a magnetic field

Electronic Transport and Quantum Phenomena in Nanowires

Nanowires are natural one-dimensional channels and offer new opportunities for advanced electronic quantum transport experiments. We review recent progress on the synthesis of nanowires and methods for the fabrication of hybrid semiconductor/superconductor systems. We discuss methods to characterize their electronic properties in the context of possible future applications such as topological and spin qubits. We focus on group III-V (InAs and InSb) and group IV (Ge/Si) semiconductors, since these are the most developed, and give an outlook on other potential materials.

Band-inverted gaps in InAs/GaSb and GaSb/InAs core-shell nanowires

The [111]-oriented InAs/GaSb and GaSb/InAs core-shell nanowires have been studied by the 8 × 8 Luttinger-Kohn Hamiltonian to search for non-vanishing fundamental gaps between inverted electron and hole bands. We focus on the variations of the band-inverted fundamental gap, the hybridization gap, and the effective gap with the core radius and shell thickness of the nanowires. The evolutions of all the energy gaps with the structural parameters are shown to be dominantly governed by the effect of quantum confinement. With a fixed core radius, a band-inverted fundamental gap exists only at intermediate shell thicknesses. The maximum band-inverted gap found is ~4.4 meV for GaSb/InAs and ~3.5 meV for InAs/GaSb core-shell nanowires, and for the GaSb/InAs core-shell nanowires the gap persists over a wider range of geometrical parameters. The intrinsic reason for these differences between the two types of nanowires is that in the shell the electron-like states of InAs is more delocalized than the hole-like state of GaSb, while in the core the hole-like state of GaSb is more delocalized than the electron-like state of InAs, and both favor a stronger electron-hole hybridization.