The end of the last century has seen a progressive interest in materials and devices with reduced size and dimensionality. The trend predicted by Moore’s law has posed strict requirements on the electronic properties of materials that cannot always be satisfied by traditional semiconductors. Nanostructures and nanomaterials have been considered the key development for the next generation technology, due their ease of processing, unique properties and compatibility with the existent Si microelectronics.

In this context group IV semiconducting nanowires (NWs) are the strongest candidate to provide the change of paradigm needed by the new generation of electron devices, either by replacing or, more realistically, integrating the existing CMOS technology. These materials present unique structural, electronic, optical and transport properties, which are intrinsically associated with their low dimensionality and with the quantum confinement effect. As a consequence, today Si, Ge and SiGe NWs are the target of the most intriguing and exciting technological applications in the field of high performance nanoelectronics, thermoelectrics, photovoltaics, biomedicine, superconductivity and spintronics.

From another point of view, since in these materials the size is at or below the characteristic length scale of some fundamental solid-state phenomena, their investigation aids in clearer and deeper insights into basic research in material science.

The primary goal of these lectures is covering both the achieved milestones and outlining the current research efforts in this field, considering experimental and theoretical viewpoints.

The main topics of this course can be summarized as follows:

• A general introduction on the topic accessible to a broad audience, including non-specialists in the field.
• A detailed description of the experimental evidences of the NWs chemical and physical properties.
• An exhaustive review of the theoretical state-of-art on the properties of NWs, trying to bridge gaps between theoretical modeling and its consolidation into experiments.
• An overview of the most exciting technological applications of these materials, highlighting their connections with basic solid-state phenomena.

In person lectures.

R. Rurali, Rev. Mod. Phys., 82 (2010).

A. Hochbaum and P. Yang, Chem. Rev., 1, 110 (2010).

M. Amato et al., Chem. Rev. 114 (2014).

M. Amato and R. Rurali, Prog. Surf. Sci. 91, 1-28 (2016).

O. Hayden et al., Nanotoday 3 5-6 (2008).

Curso de carácter multidisciplinar dirigido especialmente para estudiantes de Master y Doctorado. En particular está recomendado para las siguientes líneas de investigación:

• Nanoscopia de Materiales.
• Nanomateriales para Catálisis y Energía.
• Materiales Nanoestructurados para Nuevas Tecnologías.