Fabrication of InAs Single-Crystal Free-Standing Wires for the Study of Electron and Thermal Transport

We report the fabrication of single-crystal InAs free-standing wires by utilizing electron beam lithography and wet-chemical etching on an InAs/AlGaSb heterostructure grown by molecular beam epitaxy (MBE). Nanostructure free-standing wires as thin as 150 Å have been successfully fabricated and confirmed by the scanning electron microscope (SEM) observation. Atomic force microscope (AFM) measurements also revieled that once the cladding layer is removed, a compressively stressed free-standing wire relaxes to regain the original length resulting in a shape of a suspention bridge. The novel method of thin film strain measurement has been applied to free-standing-wires of various structures.