Anomalous behavior of epitaxial indium nano-contacts on cadmium-zinc-telluride

In this work, experimental characterization results of indium nano-contacts are presented. The indium nano-contacts are epitaxially grown on a two-dimensional surface of high-resistivity, n-type Cd0.9Zn0.1Te in ultra-high vacuum. The scaling effect in these contacts is systematic, but not linear. It is shown that the contacts exhibit a profoundly asymmetric behavior. It is argued that the rectifying behavior of these contacts is due to tunneling and that the tunneling does not necessarily imply Schottky nature. (C) 2012 American Institute of Physics. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4754706]