Precursor-Induced Growth of Highly-Oriented Nanowire Arrays

The unique optical, electrical, and thermal properties of 1D nanowires have sparked significant interest in growing high-quality 1D materials. Nanowire arrays and aligned growth offer scalability and maintain anisotropic properties, making them promising for research and applications. However, mass-producing high-quality nanowire arrays remains a challenge. A strategy is proposed for growing nanowire arrays based on homogeneous precursor as the substrate. Both calculations and experiments demonstrate that using a self-assembly micro-platform in advance facilitates epitaxial growth via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) to achieve highly oriented nanowire arrays. This is attributed to changes in crystallographic disregistry and adhesion energy. For instance, SnTe nanowire arrays are successfully grown using this method, with significantly lower thermal conductivity (≈5.5 W m^-1 K^-1 at 300 K) compared to the bulk material (≈9.1 W m^-1 K^-1 at 300 K), making them ideal for thermoelectric applications. The research lays the foundation for the tunable growth of IV-VI nanowire arrays and opens up possibilities for innovative thermoelectric nano-micro devices.