Atherton, S, Steele, B and Sasaki, S orcid.org/0000-0002-8915-6735 (2017) Unexpected Au Alloying in Tailoring In-Doped SnTe Nanostructures with Gold Nanoparticles. Crystals, 7 (3). p. 78. ISSN 2073-4352
Abstract
Materials with strong spin-orbit interaction and superconductivity are candidates for topological superconductors that may host Majorana fermions (MFs) at the edges/surfaces/vortex cores. Bulk-superconducting carrier-doped topological crystalline insulator, indium-doped tin telluride (In-SnTe) is one of the promising materials. Robust superconductivity of In-SnTe nanostructures has been demonstrated recently. }Intriguingly, not only 3-dimensional (3D) nanostructures but also ultra-thin quasi-2D and quasi-1D systems can be grown by the vapor transport method. In particular, nanostructures with a controlled dimension will give us a chance to understand the dimensionality and the quantum confinement effects on the superconductivity of the In-SnTe and may help us work on braiding MFs in various dimensional systems for future topological quantum computation technology. With this in mind, we employed gold nanoparticles (GNPs) with well-identified sizes to tailor In-SnTe nanostructures grown by vapor transport. However, we could not see clear evidence that the presence of the GNPs is necessary or sufficient to control the size of the nanostructures. Nevertheless, it should be noted that a weak correlation between the diameter of GNPs and the dimensions of the smallest nanostructures has been found so far. To our surprise, the ones grown under the vapor--liquid--solid mechanism, with the use of the GNPs, contained gold that is widely and inhomogeneously distributed over the whole body.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2017 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
Keywords: | superconducting doped topological crystalline insulator; indium doped tin telluride; vapor transport growth; nanostructure single crystals; gold nanoparticles; catalyst |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Engineering & Physical Sciences (Leeds) > School of Physics and Astronomy (Leeds) > Condensed Matter (Leeds) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 08 Mar 2017 11:06 |
Last Modified: | 05 Oct 2017 16:36 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | MDPI |
Identification Number: | 10.3390/cryst7030078 |
Related URLs: | |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:113317 |