Nucleation and growth processes of carbon nanotubes (CNTs) in iron catalyzed chemical vapor deposition (CVD) have been observed by means of in-situ environmental transmission electron microscopy. Our atomic scale observations demonstrate that solid state iron carbide (Fe3C) nanoparticles act as catalyst for the CVD growth of CNTs. Iron carbide nanoparticles are structurally fluctuated in CVD condition. Growth of CNTs can be simply explained by bulk diffusion of carbon atoms since nanoparticles are carbide.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have been grown on silicon nanowires (SiNWs) by chemical vapor deposition using Co catalyst nanoparticles. Single-walled CNTs have been grown mainly when a thin Co film (0.1 nm thick) was deposited on SiNWs, while both SWNTs and MWNTs have been grown on SiNWs on which Co 0.5 nm thick was deposited. The correlation between the diameter of catalyst nanoparticles and that of CNTs has been investigated by transmission electron microscopy. The average diameter of CNTs is smaller than that of catalyst nanoparticles.

Carrier dynamics in Er,O-codoped GaAs (GaAs:Er,O) have been systematically investigated by means of a pump and probe reflection technique with a mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser. In GaAs:Er,O, it has been found that the codoping produces a single atom configuration (Er-20 configuration) as an Er atom located at the Ga sublattice with two adjacent O atoms together with two As atoms, resulting in extremely strong Er luminescence. Time-resolved reflectivity of GaAs:Er,O exhibited an abrupt increase in amplitude, followed by a steep decrease to negative in less than 1 ps and then a gradual increase in approximately 100 ps. The steep decrease is due to bandgap renormalization. The gradual increase in reflectivity depended strongly on Er concentration, indicating that a trap induced by Er and O codoping plays an important role in dynamics of nonequilibrium carriers in GaAs:Er,O.

InxGa1−xAs quantum dots in GaP(100) crystals prepared by the OMVPE technique are observed along the [011] direction with a newly developed 200-kV spherical aberration(Cs)-corrected HRTEM, a 200-kV annular dark-field (ADF)-STEM, and a 200-kV conventional HRTEM equipped with a thermal field-emission gun. The dots are 6–10 nm in size and strongly strained due to the misfit of about 9% with the GaP substrate and GaP cap layer. All of the cross-sectional high-resolution electron micrographs show dumbbell images of Ga and P atomic columns separated by 0.136 nm in well-oriented and perfect GaP areas, but the interpretable images are limited to those taken with the Cs-corrected HRTEM and ADF-STEM with Fourier filtering of the images. The Cs-corrected HRTEM and ADF-STEM are comparable from the viewpoint of interpretable resolution. A detailed comparison between the Cs-corrected HRTEM images and the simulated ones with electron incidence tilted by 1° to 5° from the [011] zone axis gives information on local lattice bending in the dots from the images around 0.1 nm resolution. This becomes one of the useful techniques newly available from electron microscopy with sub-Ångstrom resolution.

Room-temperature Er-related electroluminescence (EL) properties have been investigated in Er,O-codoped GaAs (GaAs:Er,O) light emitting diodes (LEDs) grown by organometallic vapor phase epitaxy (OMVPE). Under forward bias, characteristic emission due to a luminescence center consisting of Er coordinated by O and As was clearly observed at room temperature, while the Er-related EL was undetectable under reverse bias. At lower current densities, the EL intensity increased linearly with the current density. Subsequently, the intensity exhibited a tendency to saturate at higher current densities. By analyzing the behavior with a fitting according to rate equations, the excitation cross section of Er ions due to current injection was determined to be approximately 10-15 cm2, which is by five orders in magnitude larger than that for optical excitation in Er-doped fiber amplifiers (10-20∼10-21 cm2).