The electronic and optical properties of semiconducting silicon nanotubes (SiNTs) are studied by means of the many-body Green's function method, i.e., GW approximation and Bethe-Salpeter equation. In these studied structures, i.e., (4,4), (6,6) and (10,0) SiNTs, self-energy effects are enhanced giving rise to large quasi-particle (QP) band gaps due to the confinement effect. The strong electron...

Techniques for depositing silicon into nanosized spaces are vital for the further scaling down of next-generation devices in the semiconductor industry. In this study, we filled silicon into 3.5-nm-diameter nanopores with an aspect ratio of 70 by exploiting thermodynamic behaviour based on the van der Waals energy of vaporized cyclopentasilane (CPS). We originally synthesized CPS as a liquid pr...

The successful synthesis of carbon nanotubes has stimulated much research in nanomaterials, in particular, in semiconducting nanostructures, which are interesting for their novel sizeand dimensionality-dependent physical properties, and their potential applications in nanoscale optoelectronics. Silicon is the most important semiconducting material, with its contemporary microelectronic technolo...

The potential of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) to outperform silicon in electronic application was finally enabled through selective separation of semiconducting nanotubes from the as-synthesized statistical mix with polymeric dispersants. Such separation methods provide typically high semiconducting purity samples with narrow diameter distribution, i.e. almost single chiralities. But...

Plastic electronics is a rapidly expanding topic, much of which has been focused on organic semiconductors. However, it is also of interest to find viable ways to integrate nanomaterials, such as silicon nanowires (SiNWs) and carbon nanotubes (CNTs), into this technology. Here, we present methods of fabrication of composite devices incorporating such nanostructured materials into an organic mat...

Atomic force microscope (AFM) based local anodic oxidation of metallic and semiconducting layers has emerged as a powerful tool for nanoscale fabrication. A unique nanoscale patterning technique has been created that couples computer aided design (CAD) with the lithographic capabilities of the AFM. Target nanostructures to be deposited on a silicon substrate are rendered as a three-dimensional ...

We present a Surface Cauchy-Born approach to modeling non-centrosymmetric, semiconducting nanostructures such as silicon that exist in a diamond cubic lattice structure. The model is based on an extension to the standard Cauchy-Born theory in which a surface energy term that is obtained from the underlying crystal structure and governing interatomic potential is used to augment the bulk energy....

In this work we report new silicon and germanium tubular nanostructures with no corresponding stable carbon analogues. The electronic and mechanical properties of these new tubes were investigated through ab initio methods. Our results show that these structures have lower energy than their corresponding nanoribbon structures and are stable up to high temperatures (500 and 1000 K, for silicon a...

In order to utilize nanostructured materials for potential solar and other energy-harvesting applications, scalable synthetic techniques for these materials must be developed. Herein we use a vapor phase conversion approach to synthesize nanowire (NW) arrays of semiconducting barium silicide (BaSi2) in high yield for the first time for potential solar applications. Dense arrays of silicon NWs o...

We review the electronic properties of pure and doped silicon and carbon clathrates. Using accurate quasiparticle calculations within the GWapproximation, we show that undoped clathrates are 1.8 eV band gap semiconducting compounds. Further, the effect of doping by elements more electronegative than Si is shown to lead to p-type doped semiconductors with a 2.3–2.5 eV band gap in the visible ene...