On the feasibility of hearing electrons in a 1D device through emitted phonons.

This work investigates the vibrational power that may potentially be delivered by electron-emitted phonons at the terminals of a device with a 1D material as the active channel. Electrons in a 1D material traversing a device excite phase-limited acoustic and optical phonon modes as they undergo streaming motion. At ultra-low temperature (4 K in this study, for example), in the near absence of background phonon activity, the emitted traveling phonons may potentially be collected at the terminals before they decay.

Gunn-Hilsum Effect in Mechanically Strained Silicon Nanowires: Tunable Negative Differential Resistance.

Gunn (or Gunn-Hilsum) Effect and its associated negative differential resistivity (NDR) emanates from transfer of electrons between two different energy subbands. This effect was observed in semiconductors like GaAs which has a direct bandgap of very low effective mass and an indirect subband of high effective mass which lies ~300 meV above the former. In contrast to GaAs, bulk silicon has a very high energy spacing (~1 eV) which renders the initiation of transfer-induced NDR unobservable.

Zero-bias photocurrents in highly-disordered networks of Ge and Si nanowires.

Semiconducting nanowire (NW) devices have garnered attention in self-powered electronic and optoelectronic applications. This work explores and exhibits, for the first time for visible light, clear evidence of the zero-biased optoelectronic switching in randomly dispersed Ge and Si NW networks. The test bench, on which the NWs were dispersed for optoelectronic characterization, was fabricated using a standard CMOS fabrication process, and utilized metal contacts with dissimilar work functions-Al and Ni.