Local Heat Dissipation and Elasticity of Suspended Silicon Nanowires Revealed by Dual Scanning Electron and Thermal Microscopies.

A novel combined setup, with a scanning thermal microscope (SThM) embedded in a scanning electron microscope (SEM), is used to characterize a suspended silicon rough nanowire (NW), which is epitaxially clamped at both sides and therefore monolithically integrated in a microfabricated device. The rough nature of the NW surface, which prohibits vacuum-SThM due to loose contact for heat dissipation, is circumvented by decorating the NW with periodic platinum dots. Reproducible approaches over these dots, enabled by the live feedback image provided by the SEM, yield a strong improvement in thermal contact resistance and a higher accuracy in its estimation.

Superior Thermoelectric Performance of SiGe Nanowires Epitaxially Integrated into Thermal Micro-Harvesters.

Semiconductor nanowires have demonstrated fascinating properties with applications in a wide range of fields, including energy and information technologies. Particularly, increasing attention has focused on SiGe nanowires for applications in a thermoelectric generation. In this work, a bottom-up vapour-liquid-solid chemical vapour Deposition methodology is employed to integrate heavily boron-doped SiGe nanowires on thermoelectric generators.

Towards femtosecond on-chip electronics based on plasmonic hot electron nano-emitters.

To combine the advantages of ultrafast femtosecond nano-optics with an on-chip communication scheme, optical signals with a frequency of several hundreds of THz need to be down-converted to coherent electronic signals propagating on-chip. So far, this has not been achieved because of the overall slow response time of nanoscale electronic circuits. Here, we demonstrate that 14 fs optical pulses in the near-infrared can drive electronic on-chip circuits with a prospective bandwidth up to 10 THz.