Unidirectional lateral nanowire formation during the epitaxial growth of GaAsBi on vicinal substrates.

We report on enhanced control of the growth of lateral GaAs nanowires (NWs) embedded in epitaxial (100) GaAsBi thin films enabled by the use of vicinal substrates and the growth-condition dependent role of Bi as a surfactant. Enhanced step-flow growth is achieved through the use of vicinal substrates and yields unidirectional nanowire growth. The addition of Bi during GaAsBi growth enhances Ga adatom diffusion anisotropy and modifies incorporation rates at steps in comparison to GaAs growth yielding lower density but longer NWs.

Demonstrating the capability of the high-performance plasmonic gallium-graphene couple.

Metal nanoparticle (NP)-graphene multifunctional platforms are of great interest for exploring strong light-graphene interactions enhanced by plasmons and for improving performance of numerous applications, such as sensing and catalysis. These platforms can also be used to carry out fundamental studies on charge transfer, and the findings can lead to new strategies for doping graphene. There have been a large number of studies on noble metal Au-graphene and Ag-graphene platforms that have shown their potential for a number of applications.

Evidence of plasmonic coupling in gallium nanoparticles/graphene/SiC.

Graphene is emerging as a promising material for plasmonics applications due to its strong light-matter interactions, most of which are theoretically predicted but not yet experimentally realized. Therefore, the integration of plasmonic nanoparticles to create metal nanoparticle/graphene composites enables numerous phenomena important for a range of applications from photonics to catalysis. For these applications it is important to articulate the coupling of photon-based excitations such as the interaction between plasmons in each of the material components, as well as their charge-based interactions dependent upon the energy alignment at the metal/graphene interface.