Unexpected Au Alloying in Tailoring In-Doped SnTe Nanostructures with Gold Nanoparticles

Materials with strong spin-orbit interaction and superconductivity are candidates for topological superconductors that may host Majorana fermions (MFs) at the edges/surfaces/vortex cores. Bulk-superconducting carrier-doped topological crystalline insulator, indium-doped tin telluride (In-SnTe) is one of the promising materials. Robust superconductivity of In-SnTe nanostructures has been demonstrated recently. Intriguingly, not only 3-dimensional (3D) nanostructures but also ultra-thin quasi-2D and quasi-1D systems can be grown by the vapor transport method. In particular, nanostructures with a controlled dimension will give us a chance to understand the dimensionality and the quantum confinement effects on the superconductivity of the In-SnTe and may help us work on braiding MFs in various dimensional systems for future topological quantum computation technology. With this in mind, we employed gold nanoparticles (GNPs) with well-identified sizes to tailor In-SnTe nanostructures grown by vapor transport. However, we could not see clear evidence that the presence of the GNPs is necessary or sufficient to control the size of the nanostructures. Nevertheless, it should be noted that a weak correlation between the diameter of GNPs and the dimensions of the smallest nanostructures has been found so far. To our surprise, the ones grown under the vapor–liquid–solid mechanism, with the use of the GNPs, contained gold that is widely and inhomogeneously distributed over the whole body.