First-principles study of (InAs)1/(GaSb)1 superlattice nanowires

As the active areas and the connection part, semiconductor nanowires have ideal shapes which are beneficial to restricting the electron motion and atomic periodicity to one one-dimensional structure. The effective selection of material components in nanowires can enhance the advantages of low-dimensional structures by analyzing the features of bulk materials. Furthermore, the nanowire properties can also be tailored by controlling the internal or intrinsic characteristics such as diameters, crystallographic growth direction, structural phase, surface crystallographic plane or saturation degree, and by applying external influences such as electric, magnetic, thermal and force fields. The bulk InAs and GaSb have approximate lattice constants, thereby resulting in small lattice mismatch for InAs/GaSb heterostructures that can finally be grown into excellent infrared optoelectronic materials. Moreover, the bulk InAs has the lowest electron effective mass in binary III-V compound semiconductors, leading to high transport features for electrons distributing most in InAs layers of InAs/GaSb superlattices. In the present work, the zinc-blend (InAs)1/(GaSb)1 superlattice nanowires (subscript denotes the number of molecular or double-atomic layers) with [001] and [111] crystallographic wire-axes have been studied by first-principles calculations for their structural, electronic and mechanical properties together with the rule of different nanowire diameters (from 0.5 to 2.0 nm). We also analyze the stress effects from external forces and examine the electronic band-edge changes with strain in wire-axis direction to determine the deformation potentials.