CRYSTAL STRUCTURE ENGINEERING FOR IMPROVED PERFORMANCE OF EMERGING NANOSCALE DEVICES

Author

Vinay Uday Chimalgi, Southern Illinois University CarbondaleFollow

Date of Award

5-1-2014

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Ahmed, Shaikh

Abstract

Recent advances in growth techniques and increasing number of experimental studies have made nanostructures grown along different crystallographic directions a reality. These new structures could not only benefit the electronic devices used in mainstream information technology but also show great promise for applications in lasers, solid-state lighting, near-field photolithography, free-space quantum cryptography, consumer displays, quantum computation, as well as diagnostic medicine and imaging. However, only few theoretical investigations have been performed on these structures due to the complex nature of the interplay of atomicity, structural fields, polarization, and quantum size-quantization, all strong function of the crystallographic direction. The objective of this work is mainly four-fold: (1) Integrate a computational framework employing a combination of fully atomistic valence force-field molecular mechanics and 20-band sp3s*d5-SO tight-binding based electronic band­structure models, and numerically investigate the effects of internal fields on the electronic and optical properties of zincblende InAs/GaAs quantum dots grown on (100), (110), and (111) orientated substrates. (2) Augment/extend the open source NEMO 3-D bandstructure simulator by incorporating a recently proposed first principles based model to gauge the importance of nonlinear piezoelectricity on the single-particle electronic states and interband optical transitions in emerging In(Ga)N/GaN disk-in-wire LED structures having c-plane and m-plane wurtzite crystal symmetry. (3) Coupling the NEMO 3-D software toolkit with a commercial TCAD simulator to determine the terminal electrical and optical characteristics of InGaN/GaN disk-in-wire LEDs; and (4) Finding an optimum crystallographic device for InGaN/GaN disk-in-wire LEDs to achieve improved internal quantum efficiency (IQE).