Methods and devices for solid state nanowire devices

Abstract

Solid state sources offers potential advantages including high brightness, electricity savings, long lifetime, and higher color rendering capability, when compared to incandescent and fluorescent light sources. To date however, many of these advantages, however, have not been borne out in providing white LED lamps for general lighting applications. The inventors have established that surface recombination through non-radiative processes results in highly inefficient electrical injection. Exploiting in-situ grown shells in combination with dot-in-a-wire LED structures to overcome this limitation through the effective lateral confinement offered by the shell the inventors have demonstrated core-shell dot-in-a-wire LEDs, with significantly improved electrical injection efficiency and output power, providing phosphor-free InGaN/GaN nanowire white LEDs operating with milliwatt output power and color rendering indices of 95-98. Additionally, the inventors demonstrate efficient UV nanowire LEDs for medical applications as well as the non-degraded growth of nanowire LEDs on amorphous substrates.