At Tyndall, we use an in-situ heating TEM stage to follow processes in nanowire materials such as re-crystallisation after ion-beam damage, reactive metal/Ge nanowire re-growth, thermal stability of nanowire silicides and germanides, metal/semiconductor nanoparticle sintering, etc. Hence, we obtain information about the kinetics of the associated processes to devise nanowire growth and processing conditions, solve contact formation and device reliability issues.
Figure 1 shows an example of a single crystal Ge nanowire that was ion beam amorphized for implantation purposes, and the corresponding series of in-situ TEM images at 400oC, that caused defective crystal re-growth.
