Method for suppression of stacking faults in Wurtzite III-V nanowires

The growth of wurtzite GaAs and InAs nanowires with diameters of a few tens of nanometers with negligible intermixing of zinc blende stacking is reported. The suppression of the number of stacking faults was obtained by a procedure within the vapor-liquid-solid growth, which exploits the theoretical result that nanowires of small diameter (∼10 nm) adopt purely wurtzite structure and are observed to thicken (via lateral growth) once the axial growth exceeds a certain length. The interest in one-dimensional structures of III-V com-pound semiconductors stems from their applicability to studying fundamental physics problems as well as from their potential applications.1-5 The III-V nanowires (NWs) are commonly nucleated and grown via vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism with the assistance of metal (usually gold) droplets,6 which can be applied to any epitaxial growth method such as MOCVD,7-10 CBE,11 or molecular beam epitaxy (MBE).12-16 The diameter and length of the VLS grown NWs are determined by the size of the gold droplet