This paper presents an overview of scanning-gate microscopy applied to the imaging of electron transport through buried semiconductor nanostructures. After a brief description of the technique and of its possible artifacts, we give a summary of some of its most instructive achievements found in the literature and we present an updated review of our own research. It focuses on the imaging of GaInAs-based quantum rings both in the low magnetic field Aharonov-Bohm regime and in the high-field quantum Hall regime. In all of the given examples, we emphasize how a local-probe approach is able to shed new, or complementary, light on transport phenomena which are usually studied by means of macroscopic conductance measurements.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1010.3924,
title = {Scanning-gate microscopy of semiconductor nanostructures: an overview},
author = {F. Martins and B. Hackens and H. Sellier and P. Liu and M. G. Pala and S. Baltazar and L. Desplanque and X. Wallart and V. Bayot and S. Huant},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1010.3924},
year = {2011}
}
Comments
Invited talk by SH at 39th "Jaszowiec" International School and Conference on the Physics of Semiconductors, Krynica-Zdroj, Poland, June 2010