title: Polaronic transport and current blockades in epitaxial silicide nanowires and nanowire arrays.
abstract: Crystalline micrometer-long YSi2 nanowires with cross sections as small as 1 × 0.5 nm(2) can be grown on the Si(001) surface. Their extreme aspect ratios make electron conduction within these nanowires almost ideally one-dimensional, while their compatibility with the silicon platform suggests application as metallic interconnect in Si-based nanoelectronic devices. Here we combine bottom-up epitaxial wire synthesis in ultrahigh vacuum with top-down miniaturization of the electrical measurement probes to elucidate the electronic conduction mechanism of both individual wires and arrays of nanowires. Temperature-dependent transport through individual nanowires is indicative of thermally assisted tunneling of small polarons between atomic-scale defect centers. In-depth analysis of complex wire networks emphasize significant electronic crosstalk between the nanowires due to the long-range Coulomb fields associated with polaronic charge fluctuations. This work establishes a semiquantitative correlation between the density and distributions of atomic-scale defects and resulting current-voltage characteristics of nanoscale network devices.
authors.affiliation: Department of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee 37966, United States.
authors.forename: Violeta
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Iancu
authors.forename: X-G
authors.initials: XG
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.forename: Tae-Hwan
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.forename: Laurent D
authors.initials: LD
authors.lastname: Menard
authors.forename: P R C
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Kent
authors.forename: Michael E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Woodson
authors.forename: J Michael
authors.initials: JM
authors.lastname: Ramsey
authors.forename: An-Ping
authors.initials: AP
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Hanno H
authors.initials: HH
authors.lastname: Weitering
mesh_terms: D004553:Electric Conductivity; D053770:Nanowires / Q000737:chemistry*; D012825:Silicon / Q000737:chemistry*; D013499:Surface Properties; D013696:Temperature; D015019:Yttrium / Q000737:chemistry
chemical_list: D015019:Yttrium; D012825:Silicon
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