LAUSR

Thanks to their peculiar shape and dimensions, semiconductor nanowires (NWs) are emerging as building components of novel devices. The presence of wurtzite (WZ) phase in the lattice structure of non-nitride III-V NWs is one of the most surprising findings in these nanostructures: this phase, indeed, cannot be found in the same materials in the bulk form, where the zincblende (ZB) structure is ubiquitous, and therefore the WZ properties are poorly known. This review focuses on WZ InP NWs, because growth techniques have reached a high degree of control on the structural properties of this material, and optical studies performed on high-quality samples have allowed determining the most useful electronic properties, which are reviewed here. After an introduction summarizing the reasons for the interest in WZ InP nanowires (Sec. I), we give an overview on growth process and structural and optical properties of WZ InP NWs (Sec. II). In Sec. III, a complete picture of the energy and symmetry of the lowest-energy...