Nanowires for photodetection
Badriyah Alhalaili1,*, Elif Peksu2,3,*, Lisa N. Mcphillips2, Matthew M. Ombaba2, M. Saif Islam2 and Hakan Karaagac3
1Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials Program, Kuwait Institute for ScientificResearch, Kuwait City, Kuwait, 2Integrated Nanodevices and Nanosystems Research,Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Davis, CA, United States,3Physics Department, Istanbul Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey
During the last two decades, significant progress has been made in developments and advances in the “bottom-up” synthesis of one-dimensional nanowires (NWs) (1D-NWs) for scalable, miniature, and energy-efficient electronics, photonics, magnetics, and electromechanical systems to transform computing and communication. Simultaneously, the current state-of-the-art silicon CMOS technology has already been scaled down to nano-meter feature sizes and is approaching the physical lower limit of beneficial scaling. These trends motivate a search for new technologies that may allow widespread and cost-effective integration of NWs in devices and circuits for electronic as well as optoelectronic applications.
There have been many publications on the field of NWs that have mainly focused on the various material growth aspects, mechanisms, and techniques to control NW crystal growth with the recent exception of an in-depth review paper specifically dedicated to the device physics of NW photodetectors (PDs. In this chapter, we have identified a wide range of literature in the field and aim to provide the reader with the overall concepts and general aspects that are important as a starting point for a discussion on NW-based PDs for communication and sensing systems. We present some exciting recent developments in NW-based detectors that have the potential to play a critical role in the development and transformation of future communication and sensing networks.
