Scanning-gate microscopy of semiconductor nanostructures: an overview

TL;DR

This paper reviews scanning-gate microscopy techniques for imaging electron transport in buried semiconductor nanostructures, highlighting recent advances and the authors' own research on GaInAs quantum rings in different magnetic regimes.

Contribution

It provides an updated overview of scanning-gate microscopy applications to semiconductor nanostructures, including novel insights from the authors' recent experiments.

Findings

Scanning-gate microscopy reveals local transport phenomena in quantum rings.

The technique offers complementary information to macroscopic conductance measurements.

Successful imaging of GaInAs quantum rings in various magnetic regimes.

Abstract

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.