The work was supported financially by the European Union Seventh Framework Program 209 (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No. 601126 210 (HANAS), the AWS Austria Wirtschaftsservice, PRIZE Programme, under Grant No. P1308457, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Unions Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SPQRel, Grant Agreement No. 679183), and the Christian Doppler Gesellschaft under the "Josef Ressel Zentrum für Materialbearbeitung mit ultrakurz gepulsten Laserquellen". J.M.-S. acknowledges support from the Government of the Principality of Asturias and the European Union through a Clarín Marie Curie-COFUND grant (PA-18-ACB17-29).
39 pags., 27 figs. -- Open Access funded by Creative Commons Atribution Licence 3.0 ; The tailoring of the physical properties of semiconductor nanomaterials by strain has been gaining increasing attention over the last years for a wide range of applications such as electronics, optoelectronics and photonics. The ability to introduce deliberate strain fields with controlled magnitude and in a reversible manner is essential for fundamental studies of novel materials and may lead to the realization of advanced multi-functional devices. A prominent approach consists in the integration of active nanomaterials, in thin epitaxial films or embedded within carrier nanomembranes, onto Pb(MgNb)O-PbTiO-based piezoelectric actuators, which convert electrical signals into mechanical deformation (strain). In this review, we mainly focus on recent advances in strain-tunable properties of self-assembled InAs quantum dots (QDs) embedded in semiconductor nanomembranes and photonic structures. Additionally, recent works on other nanomaterials like rare-earth and metal-ion doped thin films, graphene and MoS or WSe semiconductor two-dimensional materials are also reviewed. For the sake of completeness, a comprehensive comparison between different procedures employed throughout the literature to fabricate such hybrid piezoelectric-semiconductor devices is presented. It is shown that unprocessed piezoelectric substrates (monolithic actuators) allow to obtain a certain degree of control over the nanomaterials' emission properties such as their emission energy, fine-structure-splitting in self-assembled InAs QDs and semiconductor 2D materials, upconversion phenomena in BaTiO thin films or piezotronic effects in ZnS:Mn films and InAs QDs. Very recently, a novel class of micro-machined piezoelectric actuators have been demonstrated for a full control of in-plane stress fields in nanomembranes, which enables producing energy-tunable sources of polarization-entangled photons in arbitrary QDs. Future research directions and prospects are discussed. ; This work was financially supported by European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (SPQRel grant agreement no. 679183), European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement no. 601126 (HANAS) and Austrian Science Fund (FWF): P 29603. ; Peer Reviewed
