High efficiency broadband semiconductor nanowire devices and methods of fabricating without foreign catalysis

Abstract

Amongst the candidates for very high efficiency solid state light sources and full solar spectrum solar cells are devices based upon InGaN nanowires. Additionally these nanowires typically require heterostructures, quantum dots, etc which all place requirements for these structures to be grown with relatively few defects and in a controllable reproducible manner. Additionally flexibility according to the device design requires that the nanowire at the substrate may be either InN or GaN. According to the invention a method of growing relatively defect free nanowires and associated structures for group IIIA-nitrides is presented without the requirement for foreign metal catalysts and overcoming the non-uniform growth of prior art non-catalyst growth techniques. According to other embodiments of the invention self-organizing dot-within-a-dot nanowire and dot-within-a-dot-within-a-well nanowire structures are presented.