Atomistic Study of Electronic Structure of PbSe Nanowires

Abhijeet Paul, NCN, Purdue University
Gerhard Klimeck, NCN, Purdue University

Abstract

Lead Selenide (PbSe) is an attractive ‘IV-VI’ semiconductor material to design optical sensors, lasers and thermoelectric devices. Improved fabrication of PbSe nanowires (NWs) enables the utilization of low dimensional quantum effects. The effect of cross-section size (W) and channel orientation on the bandstructure of PbSe NWs is studied using an 18 band sp3d5 tight-binding theory. The bandgap increases almost with the inverse of the W for all the orientations indicating a weak symmetry dependence. [111] and [110] NWs show higher ballistic conductance for the conduction and valence band compared to [100] NWs due to the significant splitting of the projected L-valleys in [100] NWs.

Discipline(s)

Nanoscience and Nanotechnology