A method to identify shallow dopants in semiconductor nanowires

Abstract

In this paper, an electrical measurement method to identify shallow dopants in lowly doped semiconductor nanowires was suggested. Room temperature electrical measurement indicates that electron concentrations of the n-GaN nanowires are about 5.4×1017cm−3. Temperature-dependent measurement of conductivities of single nanowires in low temperature region gives activation energy of 13.3meV, which is consistent with the reported activation energy of 14meV for Si donor in n-GaN films with donor concentration of 7.4×1017cm−3. Our results confirm that the shallow donors in the as-synthesized GaN nanowires are silicon. We consider such a method may be applicable to other semiconductor nanowires.