The introduction of stable isotopes in the fabrication of semiconductor nanowires provides an additional degree of freedom to manipulate their basic properties, design an entirely new class of devices, and highlight subtle but important nanoscale and quantum phenomena. With this perspective, we report on phonon engineering in metal-catalyzed silicon nanowires with tailor-made isotopic compositi...

The spds-spin-orbit-coupled tight-binding model and linearized Boltzmann transport theory is applied to calculate the electrical conductivity, the Seebeck coefficient, and the power factor of silicon nanowires (NWs) with diameters D<12nm. Using experimentally measured values for the lattice thermal conductivity we estimate the room temperature thermoelectric figure of merit to be ZT~1. Keywords...

Hierarchical anatase TiO(2) nano-architecture arrays consisting of long TiO(2) nanowire trunk and numerous short TiO(2) nanorod branches on transparent conductive fluorine-doped tin oxide glass are successfully synthesized for the first time through a facile one-step hydrothermal route without any surfactant and template. Dye-sensitized solar cells based on the hierarchical anatase TiO(2) nano-...

In this research, ZnO nanowires doped with Mn2+ and Co2+ ions were synthesized through a facile and inexpensive hydrothermal approach, in which Mn2+ and Co2+ ions successfully substituted Zn2+ in the ZnO crystal lattice without changing the morphology and crystalline structure of ZnO. The atomic percentages of Mn and Co were 6.29% and 1.68%, respectively, in the doped ZnO nanowires. The photoca...

Semiconductor alloy nanowires with spatially graded compositions (and bandgaps) provide a new material platform for many new multifunctional optoelectronic devices, such as broadly tunable lasers, multispectral photodetectors, broad-band light emitting diodes (LEDs) and high-efficiency solar cells. In this review, we will summarize the recent progress on composition graded semiconductor alloy n...

Recently, zinc oxide (ZnO) nanowires have drawn major interest because of their semiconducting nature and unique optical and piezoelectric properties. Various applications for ZnO nanowires have been conceived, including the next generation of field effect transistors, light emitting diodes, sensors and resonators. ZnO nanowires are also envisioned as nanogenerators by exploiting the coupling o...

Due to its unique electronic properties bismuth is of enormous interest for studies on the nanoscale. In particular, when the object size is comparable to the mean free path of charge carriers le (~ 100 nm and ~ 400 μm at 300 and 4 K, respectively [1]), mesoscopic effects such as electron scattering at both surface [2] and grain boundaries [3] become significant. For investigating the influence...

Surface-enhanced Raman Scattering (SERS) is a powerful vibrational optical spectroscopy method that allows highly sensitive detection of molecules at very low concentrations matter by amplifying the electromagnetic fields created excitation localized surface plasmons on noble metal nanostructures. In presented work manufacturing composite nanostructures silicon nanowires decorated with silver (...