In-fiber production of laser-structured stress-mediated semiconductor particles

The ability to generate stressed semiconductor particles is of great importance in the development of tunable semiconductor and photonic devices. However, existing methods including both bottom-up synthesis and top-down fabrication for producing semiconductor particles are inherently free of stress effects. Here, we report a simple approach to generate controllable stress effects on both encapsulated and free-standing semiconductor particles using laser-structured in-fiber materials engineering. The physical mechanism of thermally induced in-fiber built-in stress is investigated, and the feasibility of precisely tuning the stress state during the particle formation is experimentally demonstrated by controlling the laser treatment. Gigapascal-level built-in stress, which is a sufficiently strong stimulus to enable inelastic deformations on the fabricated semiconductor particles, has been achieved via this approach. Both encapsulated and free-standing stressed semiconductor particles are generated for a wide range of in-fiber and out-fiber optoelectronic and biomedical applications.