Indium nitride (InN) is a promising material for high efficiency infrared emitters, detectors, high frequency electronic devices because of its excellent characteristics. Nanostructure materials, a new class of materials with particular properties and superior applications, have received much interest in recent decades. A team from Key Laboratory of Semiconductors Materials Science, Institute of Semiconductors, CAS, has gained insight into the research of InN nanorods. Their research has been published on April 7th 2011 in Nanotechnology*.

Well-aligned tilted Zn-doped InN nanorods have been grown successfully on r-plane sapphire in a horizontal metal-organic chemical vapor deposition system. All of the nanorods are symmetrically tilted in two opposite directions. The nanorods are single-crystalline and have exactly the same epitaxial orientation as the a-plane InN film. The nanorod has a new cross sectional shape of an axial symmetry pentagon and the axis of symmetry is the c-axis of the crystal. Zn dopant plays a crucial role in the growth progress, being an important factor in controlling the morphology of the InN nanomaterials and their properties.

The HR-XRD measurement was taken at Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility(BSRF). The chi scan of the m-plane InN nanorod gives out a strong peak at 32°which indicates that the parallelity between the m-plane of the nanorod and the film is very good. So the tilted angle between the substrate normal and the nanorod is about 32°,which can be also said that the nanorods have the same crystal orientation as the a-plane InN film grown on the substrate.

This research provides a scientific foundation for growing nanorods on the film with different dopant, understanding the uniform tilt angle and in-plane projection directions and the m-direction growth.

Article：

Biao Zhang, Huaping Song, Xiaoqing Xu, Jianming Liu, JunWang, Xianglin Liu, Shaoyan Yang, Qinsheng Zhu and ZhanguoWang, Well-aligned Zn-doped tilted InN nanorods grown on r-plane sapphire by MOCVD, Nanotechnology 2011, 22, 235603.