Widening the Length Distributions in Irregular Arrays of Self-Catalyzed III–V Nanowires

Abstract

In this work, we account the local variations of nanowire number density to extend the previous approaches to modeling of III–V nanowire length distributions in lithography-free self-catalyzed growth processes. We calculate the growth rate controlled by the re-evaporation of group V atoms from the substrate and derive the analytical expressions for length distributions in irregular arrays of nanowires. The obtained theoretical results fit well the experimentally observed statistics of self-catalyzed GaAs nanowires grown by molecular beam epitaxy on Si/SiO_x substrates.