The engineering of advanced semiconductor heterostructure materials and devices requires a detailed understanding of, and control over, the structure and properties of semiconductor materials and devices at the atomic to nanometer scale. Cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy has emerged as a unique and powerful method to characterize structural morphology and electronic properties in semiconductor epitaxial layers and device structures at these length scales. The basic experimental techniques in cross-sectional scanning tunneling microscopy are described, and some representative applications to semiconductor heterostructure characterization drawn from recent investigations in the authors laboratory are discussed. Specifically, they describe some recent studies of InP/InAsP and InAsP/InAsSb heterostructures in which nanoscale compositional clustering has been observed and analyzed.

This is a comprehensive presentation of the current knowledge on the electronic properties and manipulation of semiconductor surfaces. This book covers several of the most important and timely topics at the forefront of scanning probe microscopy, such as atom-resolving atomic force microscopy (AFM), application of atom manipulation for fabricating nanoscale and atomic scale structures, theoretical insights into Fullerenes, and atomic manipulation for future single-electron devices.

Characterization of Semiconductor Heterostructures and Nanostructures is structured so that each chapter is devoted to a specific characterization technique used in the understanding of the properties (structural, physical, chemical, electrical etc..) of semiconductor quantum wells and superlattices. An additional chapter is devoted to ab initio modeling. The book has two basic aims. The first is educational, providing the basic concepts of each of the selected techniques with an approach understandable by advanced students in Physics, Chemistry, Material Science, Engineering, Nanotechnology. The second aim is to provide a selected set of examples from the recent literature of the TOP results obtained with the specific technique in understanding the properties of semiconductor heterostructures and nanostructures. Each chapter has this double structure: the first part devoted to explain the basic concepts, and the second to the discussion of the most peculiar and innovative examples. The topic of quantum wells, wires and dots should be seen as a pretext of applying top level characterization techniques in understanding the structural, electronic etc properties of matter at the nanometer (and even sub-nanometer) scale. In this respect it is an essential reference in the much broader, and extremely hot, field of Nanotechnology. Comprehensive collection of the most powerful characterization techniques for semiconductors heterostructures and nanostructures Most of the chapters are authored by scientists that are world-wide among the top-ten in publication ranking of the specific field Each chapter starts with a didactic introduction on the technique The second part of each chapters deals with a selection of top examples highlighting the power of the specific technique to analyse the properties of semiconductors heterostructures and nanostructures

Recently, the scanning transmission electron microscope has become capable of forming electron probes of atomic dimensions. Through the technique of Z-contrast imaging, it is now possible to form atomic resolution images with high compositional sensitivity from which atomic column positions can be directly determined. An incoherent image of this nature also allows atomic resolution chemical analysis to be performed, by locating the probe over particular columns or planes seen in the image while electron energy loss spectra are collected. These powerful techniques, combined with atomic-scale calculations, constitute a powerful probe of the structural, kinetic and thermodynamic properties of complex materials. The authors show the direct observation of As segregated to specific sites in a Si grain boundary, and present a candidate model for the structure of the Si/SiO2 interface.