Study of phonon modes in germanium nanowires

The observation of pure phonon confinement effect in germanium nanowires is limited due to the illumination sensitivity of Raman spectra. In this paper we measured Raman spectra for different size germanium nanowires with different excitation laser powers and wavelengths. By eliminating the local heating effect, the phonon confinement effect for small size nanowires was clearly identified. We have also fitted the Raman feature changes to estimate the size distribution of nanowires.