Exploring hybrid nanowire transistors; A route to discoveries and new technological opportunities

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My previous NSERC Discovery Grant yielded exceptional progress in: (a) Making so-called semiconductor nanowire (NW) heterostructures (NWHs), with lengths/widths ~1/10th and ~1/1,000th of the thickness of a human hair (i.e., where the NW material changes along its length to another semiconductor, or where it is clad in a shell of another semiconductor). Such NWHs enable unprecedented control over where electrons reside; (b) Realising NWs from semiconductors which also showed magnetic properties, well above room temperature - an important precursor for so-called spintronics, where both electron charge and spin are used for information processing (IP); and (c) A first demonstration of a hybrid device mating a high temperature superconductor (HTSC) to a thin film semiconductor, showing, for the first time at elevated temperature, how so-called Cooper pairs could be efficiently injected into a thin film semiconductor, with promise for a future quantum computer. My current objective is to harness this work to explore the completely novel field of so called hybrid field effect transistors (FETs) to enable injection/control of; (a) Cooper pairs in a NWH to generate entangled photon pairs (EPPs); (b) spin polarised electrons for a so-called NWH spin-FET and (c) light induced charge, for single photon detection (SPD). The work should contribute to uncovering fundamental science (e.g., testing of Bell inequalities and advancing work on the unobserved new particle, the Majorana Fermion) and significantly furthering practical implementation of IP technologies (e.g., toward quantum cryptography and low power spintronics for information storage/manipulation). The research will offer an exceptional opportunity for training of 4 PhD students while advancing our world class leading edge research program in NWH science.