Jie Xiang

Electronic and optoelectronic devices impact many areas of society, from simple household appliances and multimedia systems to communications, computing, and medical instruments. Given the demand for ever more compact and powerful systems, there is growing interest in the development of nanoscale devices that could enable new functions and/or greatly enhanced performance. Semiconductor nanowires are emerging as a powerful class of materials that, through controlled growth and organization, are opening up substantial opportunities for novel nanoscale photonic and electronic devices. We review the broad array of nanowire building blocks available to researchers and discuss a range of electronic and optoelectronic nanodevices, as well as integrated device arrays, that could enable diverse and exciting applications in the future.

A state of matter in which molecules show a long-range orientational order and no positional order is called a nematic liquid crystal. The best known and most widely used (for example, in modern displays) is the uniaxial nematic, with the rod-like molecules aligned along a single axis, called the director. When the molecules are chiral, the director twists in space, drawing a right-angle helicoid and remaining perpendicular to the helix axis; the structure is called a chiral nematic. Here using transmission electron and optical microscopy, we experimentally demonstrate a new nematic order, formed by achiral molecules, in which the director follows an oblique helicoid, maintaining a constant oblique angle with the helix axis and experiencing twist and bend. The oblique helicoids have a nanoscale pitch. The new twist-bend nematic represents a structural link between the uniaxial nematic (no tilt) and a chiral nematic (helicoids with right-angle tilt). Theories predict the existence of a nematic liquid crystal phase with a local twist-bend structure, but no experimental proof is available over the past 40 years. Borshch et al.identify this phase for the first time in two different materials containing dimeric molecules.

Two-dimensional electron and hole gas systems, enabled through band structure design and epitaxial growth on planar substrates, have served as key platforms for fundamental condensed matter research and high-performance devices. The analogous development of one-dimensional (1D) electron or hole gas systems through controlled growth on 1D nanostructure substrates, which could open up opportunities beyond existing carbon nanotube and nanowire systems, has not been realized. Here, we report the synthesis and transport studies of a 1D hole gas system based on a free-standing germanium/silicon (Ge/Si) core/shell nanowire heterostructure. Room temperature electrical transport measurements clearly show hole accumulation in undoped Ge/Si nanowire heterostructures, in contrast to control experiments on single-component nanowires. Low-temperature studies show well-controlled Coulomb blockade oscillations when the Si shell serves as a tunnel barrier to the hole gas in the Ge channel. Transparent contacts to the hole gas also have been reproducibly achieved by thermal annealing. In such devices, we observe conductance quantization at low temperatures, corresponding to ballistic transport through 1D subbands, where the measured subband energy spacings agree with calculations for a cylindrical confinement potential. In addition, we observe a "0.7 structure," which has been attributed to spontaneous spin polarization, suggesting the universality of this phenomenon in interacting 1D systems. Lastly, the conductance exhibits little temperature dependence, consistent with our calculation of reduced backscattering in this 1D system, and suggests that transport is ballistic even at room temperature.