Thermoelectric power measurements of wide band gap semiconducting nanowires

Abstract

We investigated the temperature-dependent thermoelectric power (TEP) of individual wide band gap ZnO and GaN semiconducting nanowires by fabricating the devices with good Ohmic contacts. In the temperature range of 10–300 K, the measured TEP of both nanowires was linearly dependent on temperature, indicating the degenerate doping nature of these nanowires. The room temperature TEP value of ZnO nanowires was as high as −400 μV/K while an order of magnitude smaller TEP value was observed in GaN. The negative sign of TEP values shows that electrons are the majority carriers in these wide band gap nanowires. More importantly, in comparison with gate-dependent transport measurements of the nanowire field effect transistors, analysis of temperature-dependent TEP measurements provides a reliable way of estimating the majority carrier concentration of nanowires, where conventional Hall effect measurements cannot be used.