Along with the downshift, a remarkable increase of the full width at half maximum to 14 cm−1 is observed. It should be mentioned that the downshift of the TO mode was also observed in the Raman measurements on the as-grown NW ensemble samples. Generally, there are two factors which might induce the downward shift of phonon mode frequency and the broadening of the

Raman peak. One is laser heating effect. As reported before [27–30], local heating might also cause the downshift of phonon mode selleck chemical frequency and the broadening of phonon peak. To reduce the laser heating effect, we use the lowest laser power and the monodisperse wires were placed on high thermal conductivity HOPG to avoid substrate effects. An excitation power-dependent Raman measurement was performed on the single NWs, and no shifting of the phonon peak was observed when the excitation power is 0.05 mW (data not shown here), which may be due to high-thermal conductivity substrate (HOPG) and low

nanowire coverage over the substrate [31]. Thus, this heating effect can be lowered in our measurements; the other is quantum confinement effect. It is well demonstrated before in theory and experiments that for small-sized crystals like quantum wires, nanowires, etc., the quantum confinement effect will be very obvious and result in Romidepsin the downward frequency shift and linewidth broadening of the TO and LO phonon modes. Such change of phonon mode frequency and linewidth is mainly due to the relaxation of the q = 0 selection rule in the Raman scattering [14, 15, 22, 29–33]. For better understanding of phonon properties in single NWs, excitation polarization-dependent Raman measurements were also performed on the single NWs. Figure 4c shows the Raman spectra of single NWs measured under four main polarization configurations ( , , , and ). It is observed that the intensity of the TO mode

measured with parallel configuration, i.e., and , when the incident and scattered light polarizations are parallel to each other, is much stronger than that with perpendicular configuration, and the intensity measured under the configuration is much stronger than that under the configuration. This indicates that the highest scattering intensity occurs when both the incident and analyzed light linear polarization are parallel to the NW growth axis. These results Protirelin observed here are in accordance with those of ZB GaAs NWs reported in [16], which is mainly caused by the selection rules of the crystal. The excitation polarization-dependent Raman scattering measurements were performed by rotating the half-wave plate in 10° ± 2° increments and thus changing the angle, ϕ, between the electric vector of the incident light and the long axis of the NW. Figure 4d shows the polar scan of the intensity of the TO phonon mode of single InAs NWs as a function of the angle measured under two scattering configurations and , where .