Phase diagrams for understanding gold-seeded growth of GaAs and InAs nanowires

Phase diagrams are useful tools to study the phase equilibria of nanowire materials systems because the growth of nanowires is accompanied by phase formation and phase transition. We have modeled the phase equilibria of the As-Au-Ga ternary system by means of the CALPHAD method. This method is a well-established semi-empirical technique for thermodynamic modeling in which Gibbs energy functions with free parameters are defined for all phases in a system followed by adjusting these parameters to the experimental data. Using the resulting As-Au-Ga thermodynamic database, four vertical cuts of this ternary system are calculated and all show good agreement with experiments. This ternary system is particularly useful for predicting the state of the Au seed alloys when growing GaAs nanowires and we discuss such predictions. Similar calculations are performed for Au-seeded InAs nanowires. We show that the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth fails for InAs nanowires, while GaAs nanowires can grow from a liquid particle. Our calculations are in agreement with experimental data on the growth of Au-seeded GaAs and InAs nanowires.