Speaker
Description
This presentation reviews some recent experiments using free-electron-laser-based narrow-band as well as tabletop-laser-based single-cycle terahertz (THz) fields for exploring electronic properties in semiconducting GaAs/InGaAs core/shell nanowires (NW) [1]. In undoped NW, charge carriers are optically excited by near-infrared pulses and probed by strong single-cycle THz fields up to 0.6 MV/cm. The photoexcited charge carriers exhibit a pronounced plasmon resonance, which undergoes a systematic redshift and a suppression of its spectral weight, which indicates a drop of the electron mobility at the highest fields to about half of the original value [2]. In n-type NWs, intense narrowband THz excitation causes a nonlinear plasmonic response, which manifests itself by a similar pronounced red shift of the plasma resonance. This nonlinearity is investigated by scattering-type scanning near-field infrared microscopy on individual NWs. For NW doped with Si to a concentration of 9x10^18 cm^-3, a spectrally sharp plasma resonance, located at a photon energy of 125 meV for weak excitation, undergoes a power-dependent redshift to about 95 meV [3]. In these experiments, the observed behavior is attributed to a pronounced increase of the average electron effective mass caused by transient carrier heating and electron intervalley transfer. The results quantify the nonlinear transport regime in GaAs-based nanowires and show their high potential for development of nanodevices operating at THz frequencies.
[1] L. Balaghi et al., Widely tunable GaAs band gap via strain engineering in core/shell nanowires, Nature Comm. 10, 2793 (2019)
[2] R. Rana et al., Nonlinear terahertz field-induced charge transport and transferred-electron effect in InGaAs nanowires, Nano Lett. 20, 3225 (2020)
[3] D. Lang et al., Nonlinear plasmonic response of doped nanowires observed by infrared nanospectroscopy, Nanotechnol. 30, 084003 (2019)
