Semiconductor nanowires have become an important building block for nanotechnology. The growth of semiconductor nanowires using a metal catalyst via the vapor–liquid–solid (VLS) or vapor–solid–solid (VSS) mechanism has yielded growth directions in 〈1 1 1〉, 〈1 0 0〉 and 〈1 1 0〉 etc. In this paper, we summarize and discuss a broad range of factors that affect the growth direction of VLS or VSS gro...

Au nanoparticles are efficient catalysts for the vapour–solid–liquid (VLS) growth of semiconductor nanowires, but Au poses fundamental reliability concerns for applications in Si semiconductor technology. In this work we show that the choice of catalysts for Si nanowire growth can be broadened when the need for catalytic precursor dissociation is eliminated through the use of plasma enhancement...

Silicon nanowires have been identified as important components for future electronic and sensor nanodevices. So far gold has dominated as the catalyst for growing Si nanowires via the vapour-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism. Unfortunately, gold traps electrons and holes in Si and poses a serious contamination problem for Si complementary metal oxide semiconductor (CMOS) processing. Although there a...

Nanowire growth by the vapour-liquid-solid (VLS) process enables a high level of control over nanowire composition, diameter, growth direction, branching and kinking, periodic twinning, and crystal structure. The tremendous impact of VLS-grown nanowires is due to this structural versatility, generating applications ranging from solid-state lighting and single-photon sources to thermoelectric de...

Recent progress in human genomics and proteomics has significantly increased the number of macromolecular targets potentially involved in drug discovery campaigns. Today technologies like combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening (HTS) authorize biological assays of a large number of small molecules against the therapeutically relevant targets. However the escalating costs highlight...

Visual Languages (VLs) are beneficial particularly for domainspecific applications, since they can support ease of understanding by visual metaphors. If such a language has an execution semantics, comprehension of program execution may be supported by direct visualization. This closes the gap between program depiction and execution. To rapidly develop a VL with execution semantics a generator f...

We demonstrate a modulation of thermoelectric power factor via a radial dopant inhomogeneity in B-doped Si nanowires. These nanowires grown via vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) method were naturally composed of a heavily doped outer shell layer and a lightly doped inner core. The thermopower measurements for a single nanowire demonstrated that the power factor values were higher than those of homogeneo...