Novel GaNAs and GaNP-based nanowires — Promising materials for optoelectronics and photonics

In this paper we review our recent results on optical properties of coaxial nanowires (NWs) based on dilute nitride alloys, such as GaAsN and GaNP. We show that these structures have a high structural and optical quality, and can potentially be used as polarized nano-scale light sources that emit linearly polarized light with the polarization direction perpendicular to the wire axis even in zinc blende NWs of various diameters. We also demonstrate that, though the GaN_xP_1-x alloys have rather wide bandgap energies of 1.9 - 2.3 eV, the coaxial GaNP NWs absorb infrared light via two-step two-photon absorption.