Observation of coherent electron transport in self-catalysed InAs and InAs1–xSbx nanowires grown on silicon

Abstract

We report the observation of phase coherent transport in catalyst-free InAs and InAs1–xSbx nanowires grown by molecular beam epitaxy on silicon (111) substrates. We investigate three different methods to gain information on the phase coherence length of the nanowires: first through the study of universal conductance fluctuations as a function of both magnetic field and gate voltage and then through localisation effects. The analysis of these different quantum effects gave consistent results and a phase-coherence length in the hundred nanometre range was extracted for all nanowires below 10 K. This demonstrates the potential of catalyst-free nanowires as building blocks for future quantum electronics devices directly integrated with silicon circuits.