Zainul Aabdin

1 Introduction The continued demand for energy-efficient and high-performance electronic devices necessitates the development of new nanofabrication methods for a wide range of semiconductor materials.[1-5] Ease of processing, high carrier mobilities, and narrow band gap of Ge and its alloys (e.g., SiGe, GeSn)[6-9] make them attractive materials for transistors,[1, 10, 11] photodetectors,[8, 12, 13] and quantum devices.[7] For example, dimensional scaling of future transistors requires...

1 Introduction Thermoelectric (TE) devices have the ability to directly convert heat into electricity, without the need for moving parts.[1, 2] The efficiency of a TE device is related to the dimensionless figure of merit (zT) which is defined as z T = S 2 σ T κ $zT = \frac{{{{S}^2}\sigma T}}{\kappa}$ , where S is the Seebeck coefficient, σ is the electrical conductivity, T is the absolute temperature, κ is the thermal conductivity, and S2σ is the power factor (PF) of the TE material.[2] A...

1 Introduction The ever-growing demand for high-performance and power-efficient microelectronic devices has driven the semiconductor industry to downscale the transistors and metal interconnects.[1, 2] The interconnects are the nanocrystalline metal nanowires (NWs) connecting the transistors, and copper (Cu) has been used as the core metal of interconnects over the past two decades.[3-5] However, as the critical dimensions of NWs decrease below 10 nm, the resistivity of Cu becomes much higher...