Monitoring the Fermi-level position within the bandgap on a single nanowire: A tool for local investigations of doping

The control of the doping in nanowires (NWs) is of fundamental importance for the implementation of NW-based devices. A method is presented to obtain local information about doping by monitoring the Fermi-energy position within the bandgap at the surface along single NWs through spatially resolved x-ray photoemission spectroscopy. The experimental results are complemented by theoretical simulations of the carrier profile, taking into account the presence of electronic surface states and quantifying the impact of carrier depletion at the NW surface. This combined approach allows to determine the effect of the incorporation of Si dopants in GaAs NWs following different growth protocols, such as vapor-liquid-solid axial growth or vapor-solid radial growth, and in the resulting core-shell structures and axial junctions. The method also revelaed the strong dependence of the resulting doping on the morphology of the single NW (orientation, shell thickness). This approach can be easily applied to other nanoscale objects, allowing the direct observation of how doping (or junctions, or adsorbates,…) may locally affect the position of the Fermi level at the surface, which is a crucial factor in several application fields, such as photovoltaic and photocatalysis.