Zinc oxide (ZnO, n-type) and copper oxide (CuO, p-type) nanowires have been synthesized and preliminarily investigated as innovative materials for the fabrication of a proof-of-concept thermoelectric device. The Seebeck coefficients, electrical conductivity and thermoelectric power factors (TPF) of both semiconductor materials have been determined independently using a custom experimental set-u...

ZnO nanowires provide enormous advantages such as high aspect ratio, good field electron emission property and excellent molecular absorption and desorption characteristics in catalyst applications. Fabrication technologies with nanometer resolution will enable us to realize complex solid state devices with novel mechanical, electronic or optical functions. In this paper, two most popular subst...

Here, a new method is demonstrated that uses sideways pulsed laser deposition to deliberately bend nanowires into a desired shape after growth and fabricate arc-shaped composite nanowire arrays of a wide range of nanomaterials. The starting nanowires can be ZnO, but the materials to be deposited can be metallic, semiconductor, or ceramic depending on the application. This method provides a gene...

Plastic relaxation of the misfit stress in core-shell semi-conducting nanowires can lead to structural defects, detrimental to applications. Core-shell Zn0.7Mg0.3O/ZnO quantum well heterostructures were deposited on ZnO nanowires. Strain along the a and c axes of the wurtzite structure is relaxed through the glide of dislocation half-loops from the free surfaces, within pyramidal and prismatic ...

We report an approach for growing aligned ZnO nanowire arrays with a high degree control over size, orientation, dimensionality, uniformity, and possibly shape. Our method combines e-beam lithography and a low temperature hydrothermal method to achieve patterned and aligned growth of ZnO NWs at <100degreesC on general inorganic substrates, such as Si and GaN, without using catalyst. This approa...

Co-synthesis of In2O3 and ZnO nanowires (NWs) were grown on silicon and alumina substrates using vapour transport deposition method. Their morphological structures showed that the NWs were rather aligned on silicon substrate and randomly oriented on alumina substrate. The formation of NWs on silicon substrate was found to be dominated by the growth of ZnO NWs while that on alumina substrate was...

Herein we demonstrate that intrinsically fluorescent zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires (NWs) can be adopted for molecularly targeted imaging of cancer cells, after they are functionalized to render water solubility, biocompatibility, and low cellular toxicity. Optical imaging of integrin α(v)β(3) on U87MG human glioblastoma cells was achieved with RGD peptide-conjugated green fluorescent ZnO NWs, whic...

Organic (P3HT/PCBM) solar cells are coated with ZnO nanowires as antireflection coatings and show up to 36% enhancement in efficiency. The improvement is ascribed to an effective refractive index which results in Fabry-Perot absorption bands which match the polymer band-gap. The effect is particularly pronounced at high light incidence angles. Simultaneously, the coating is used as a UV-barrier...


 Improving Hybrid Solar Cells: Overcoming Charge Extraction Issues in Bulk Mixtures of Polythiophenes and Zinc Oxide Nanostructures! ! Grant Olson! ! ! Organic photovoltaics (OPVs) have received a great deal of focus in recent years as a possible alternative to expensive silicon based solar technology. Current challenges for organic photovoltaics are centered around improving their lifetimes a...

Highly powered electrostatic capacitors based on nanostructures with a high aspect ratio are becoming critical for advanced energy storage technology because of their high burst power and energy storage capability. We report the fabrication process and the electrical characteristics of high capacitance density capacitors with three-dimensional solid-state nanocapacitors based on a ZnO nanowire ...