Enthusiasm
surrounding nanostructure fabrication continues to grow, both for the
novel scientific phenomena unveiled thereby and for the tremendous
technological innovations expected to flow out of them. The recent
creation of new journals ("The Journal of Nanotechnology") and the
renaming of old ones (J.Vac. Sci. Technol. B is now subtitled
"Microelectronics and Nanometer Structures") attest to the importance
of these new developments. The techniques of Organometallic Chemical
Vapour Deposition (OMCVD) and Molecular Beam Epitaxy (MBE) currently
provide us with structures exhibiting quantum confinement in one
dimension. These are known as quantum wells and are at the heart of
quantum well semiconductor lasers, now widely used in CD players and
CD-ROM drives. Further confinement to produce quantum wires and
quantum dots is being performed in many research laboratories while
appropriate technological applications are being developed.
The success of any nanostructure formation program centers on one's ability to both create and position nanometer scale features on different materials. The atomic or near-atomic control of the placement of material is the essence of the problem faced in the fabrication of these novel structures. Equally important is the ability to probe their structural and electronic properties.
Our proposed research program will develop the foundation upon which we will be able to understand a range of chemical processes and evaluate their utility as general purpose tools for nanofabrication activities. We do not see ourselves as "device engineers" but rather are more interested in understanding the physical and chemical processes that will be of use in quantum device fabrication. One can conceive of two complementary approaches to nanofabrication:
Both the etching and deposition paradigms are related by the fact that they both focus on the selective reactivity of particular bonds in the precursor material. It is this complementarity and commonality which we intend to investigate. Porous silicon is an excellent example of the fabrication of nanostructured material via an etching pathway while OMCVD is a powerful process for the deposition of quantum confined structures. Our plan is to cooperatively pursue these two complementary directions.
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