The cool thing about doing an engineering physics degree is working on cool complex projects for one class while also discovering cool new physics in another. I have written a lot of papers throughout my degree and instead of letting them die in my Google Drive, I thought it would be interesting to publish them here to look back on later. Enjoy!
This first paper in this series is from my final year in the program as part of my class ELEC 415- Semiconductor Devices: Physics, Design, and Analysis. It is based on a 2021 paper (Balaghi et al.) that found that nanowires under strain are performing better than their unstrained counterparts and, more significantly, better than the same material in bulk.
TL;DR – To explain this in simplest terms, you may be familiar with the idea of your phone containing billions of transistors to make it function very well. As you can imagine, in order to fit billions of something into a space as small as your phone, you would need them to be very very small. As such, transistors are reaching a size limit where they are so small that effects from quantum physics begin to mess with things. And so, engineers and scientists have had to come up with interesting new designs for the transistor since reducing the size becomes more and more expensive. One of these ideas is known as the “gate-all-around” transistors which makes use of these very tiny wires (nanowires) but one recurring issue is that the performance of these wires has always been worse than using a larger piece of material (bulk material), namely the electron mobility (ability to move charges) of these nanowires has always been worse than the bulk material. However, this paper has found a potential new solution! By stretching the wire lengthwise it was found that the mobility actually outperformed the bulk material. This is very promising result for the future of nanowire technology.
joey gaffney 