A superficial tale: How thin threads of semiconductors can offer a remarkable platform for sensing and future electronics

Harry Ruda
University of Toronto

Abstract

The race to making smaller and smaller things can arguably be attributed to a talk given by the famous physicist, Richard Feynman, in a lecture he gave at an American Physical Society meeting in 1959. He envisaged new materials synthesized by manipulation of individual atoms – something realized by Don Eiglers group at IBM in 1989. On the way down, and in the spirit of manipulating matter are nanometer scale structures such as quantum dots and nanowires – the latter typically have diameters of a few tens of nanometers and lengths of about microns. In this talk, I will focus on nanowires and their unique properties, and how these can be used to advantage to realise state of the art chemical sensors and offer a possible future quantum computing platform. The talk will discuss the critical role of surface and surface electronic states on electron transport, and how on the one hand species interacting with the surface can dictate transport and signal details of those interactions, while on the other hand, appropriate manipulation of the surface states can reveal near-lossless electron transmission through the nanowires.