Aerial view of HZDR. Credit: HZDR, Jürgen-M. Schulter
The RADICAL project is a collaboration between multidisciplinary partners across Europe including University College of Cork (Ireland), HZDR (Germany), University of York (United Kingdom), National Technical University of Athens (Greece), Smartcom (Bulgaria) and UCC Academy (Ireland).
In this article, we introduce our partners at Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), who lead the fabrication of our nanowire sensors.
Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) is a large governmental research institution, a member of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, located near Dresden and has facilities at three other sites in Germany as well as in Grenoble, France. It is composed of 8 institutes, which conduct active research in 3 major areas: energy, matter and health. More than 1200 people are employed at HZDR, including nearly 500 scientists and 150 doctoral candidates from over 60 countries.
The Institute of Ion-Beam Physics and Materials Research involved in RADICAL offers high-level competences in the field of basic and applied research on the synthesis, modification, analysis and application of a wide range of materials (from semiconductors and oxides to metals and magnetic materials, from bulk materials and thin films to nanostructures and 2D materials) by ion beams, ion-assisted methods, nanofabrication, short time annealing and large variety of characterisation techniques.
Role in RADICAL
The group participating in the RADICAL project is a part of the Nanoelectronics Department and has significant expertise in nanofabrication as well as in development, fabrication and characterisation of novel nanoelectronic devices based on group IV (Si-Ge-Sn) semiconductor nanowires.
Within RADICAL, Dr Yordan Georgiev and his team are leading Work Package 1 – Fabrication of Silicon JNT devices, which includes the fabrication and characterisation of the sensor devices, conducting sensing experiments and the related analyses and research activities.
In addition, the HZDR team are providing contributions to Work Packages 3 and 4 in optimising the silicon JNT sensors for atmospheric radicals.
For performing the work planned within RADICAL, the HZDR group is using a wide range of state-of-the-art equipment for material processing including ion implantation combined with furnace, rapid thermal, flash lamp and laser annealing; a class 100 clean room and nanofabrication facility where standard micro- and nanofabrication processing is available such as thin film deposition, electron beam lithography and photolithography, wet chemical and dry etching as well as oxidation and diffusion.
The group also has at its disposal a wide variety of techniques for structural, chemical and electrical characterisation including scanning and transmission electron microscopy (combined with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy), atomic force microscopy, Micro-Raman spectroscopy, temperature dependent photo-luminescence, spectroscopic ellipsometry, X-Ray diffraction, Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy, Terahertz spectroscopy, temperature dependent Hall measurements, sheet resistance measurement, and I-V and C-V measurements.
The HZDR team working on RADICAL include:
Dr. Yordan Georgiev – Head of Nanofabrication and Analysis, Institute of Ion-Beam Physics and Materials Research, HZDR
Dr. Slawomir Prucnal – Senior scientist, Semiconductor Materials, HZDR
Ahmad Echresh – Postdoctoral researcher, HZDR
Dr. Muhammad Bilal Khan – Former postdoctoral researcher, Transport Phenomena in Nanostructures, HZDR
Sayantan Ghosh – PhD student, Transport Phenomena in Nanostructures, HZDR
Find out more about HZDR’s work on RADICAL in their guest blog: Creating the Nanowire Sensor Foundation at HZDR
