Enhanced Piezoresistive Behaviors of SiC Nanowire by Coupling with Piezoelectric Effect.

Improving the sensitivity of the piezoresistive behaviors of semiconductor nanostructures is critically important, since it is one of the keys to explore advanced pressure sensors with desired sensitivity. Herein, we reported a strategy for improving the piezoresistive behaviors of SiC nanowire by coupling with the piezoelectric effect of ZnO nanolayers, which were grown by an atomic layer deposition (ALD) approach. As a result, the detected current of the as-constructed ZnO/SiC heterojunction nanowires is 6 times more than SiC nanowires, suggesting its substantially improved sensitivity. Moreover, the measured DeltaR/R0 value and gauge factor (GF) of the ZnO/SiC heterojunction nanowires could be up to 0.82 and 50.93, respectively, which was profoundly higher than those of SiC counterpart and most of reported positive piezoresistive SiC sensors.