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Nano9

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pramishmeher5
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6 views

Nano9

Uploaded by

pramishmeher5
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Size Effects

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Size Dependence of Properties
• Many properties of solids depend on the size range over which they are measured.
• Microscopic details become averaged when investigating bulk materials.
• Macro- or large-scale range - from millimeters to kilometers
• Traditional fields of physics such as mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and
optics, etc.
• Averaged properties - the density and elastic moduli in mechanics, the resistivity
and magnetization in electricity and magnetism, and the dielectric constant in
optics.
• Micrometer - nanometer range - many properties of materials change, such as
mechanical, ferroelectric, and ferromagnetic properties.
• Nanoscale level: Nanoscience ~ from 1 to 100 nm.
• Below this there is the atomic scale near 0.1 nm.
• Followed by the nuclear scale near a femtometer (10‒15 m).
2
Number of Atoms in Unit Cells
• Consider type III-V semiconductor GaAs: Lattice constant a = 0.565 nm, and
the volume of the unit cell is (0.565)3 = 0.180 nm3.
• Face-centered cubic (FCC) lattice: 4 Ga and 4 As atoms.

• The two lattices are displaced


with respect to each other by
the amount (¼, ¼, ¼) along the
unit cell body diagonal.
• Each Ga atom in the center
of a tetrahedron of As atoms
corresponding to the
1
grouping GaAs4, and each As
atom in a corresponding
configuration AsGa4.
• There are about 22 of each atom type per cubic nanometer, and a cube-shaped quantum dot
10 nm on a side contains 5.56 × 103 unit cells. 3
Number of Atoms on the Surface of Unit Cells
• How many of the atoms are on the surface?
• Relation for Nanostructures containing n3 unit cells, the number of atoms NS on the
surface, the total number of atoms NT, and the size or dimension d of the cube:
(1)
(2)
(3)
• The large percentage of atoms on the surface (Last column of Table 1) for small n is one
of the principal factors that differentiates properties of nanostructures from those of the
bulk material.

4
5
Mean Free Path of Charge Carriers
• A charge carrier in a conductor or semiconductor has its forward motion in an
applied electric field periodically interrupted by scattering off phonons and
defects.
• An electron or hole moving with a drift velocity v will, on the average, experience
a scattering event every τ seconds, and travel a distance l called the mean free
path between collisions, where l = vτ
• This is called intraband scattering because the charge carrier remains in the same
band after scattering, such as the valence band in the case of holes.
• Mean free paths in metals depend strongly on the impurity content, and in
ordinary metals typical values might be in the low nanometer range, perhaps
from 2 to 50 nm.
• In very pure samples they will, of course, be much longer.
• The resistivity of a polycrystalline conductor or semiconductor composed of
microcrystallites with diameters significantly greater than the mean free path
resembles that of a network of interconnected resistors.
• But when the microcrystallite dimensions approach or become less than l, the
resistivity depends mainly on scattering off boundaries between crystallites.
6
Crystal Defects
• Various types of defects in a lattice can interrupt the forward motion of
conduction electrons, and limit the mean free path.
• Examples of zero-dimensional defects are missing atoms called vacancies,
and extra atoms called interstitial atoms located between standard lattice
sites.
• A vacancy-interstitial pair is called a Frenkel defect.
• An example of a one-dimensional dislocation is a lattice defect at an edge,
or a partial line of missing atoms.
• Common two-dimensional defects are a boundary between grains, and a
stacking fault arising from a sudden change in the stacking arrangement of
close-packed planes.
• A vacant space called a pore, a cluster of vacancies, and a precipitate of a
second phase are three-dimensional defects.
• All of these can bring about the scattering of electrons, and thereby limit
the electrical conductivity.
• Some nanostructures are too small to have internal defects. 7
The Level of Doping of a Semiconductor
• For typical doping levels of 1014 to 1018 donors/cm3 a quantum-dot cube
100 nm on a side would have, on the average, from 10‒1 to 103 conduction
electrons.
• The former figure of 10‒1 electrons per cubic centimetre means that on the
average only 1 quantum dot in 10 will have one of these electrons.
• A smaller quantum-dot cube only 10 nm on a side would have, on the
average 1 electron for the 1018 doping level, and be very unlikely to have
any conduction electrons for the 1014 doping level.
• A similar analysis can be made for quantum wires and quantum wells,
• The results shown in Table 2 demonstrate that these quantum structures
are typically characterized by very small numbers or concentrations of
electrons that can carry current.
• This results in the phenomena of single-electron tunnelling and the
Coulomb blockade.

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