Controlled Crystal-Growth and Structures of Silicon Nanowires for Smart Applications

One-dimensional nanostructures such as semiconductor nanowires (NWs) are attractive building blocks due to their promising physical properties and potential as active materials in future electronic and optoelectronic applications. The Crystal growth of nanowires occurs mainly at the interfaces between the growing crystals and the supply media. This article reports on the silicon nanowires grown using a vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) concept. One of the key advantages and the beauty of VLS is that controlled placement or templating of the seed metal produces consequently templated NW growth. This templating is highly required for direct integration of NWs into nanodevices for various smart applications, including sensors, actuators, thermoelectricity generation and photovoltaics. We discuss the major questions related to the discovery of fundamentally new phenomena versus performance benchmarking for many of the Si-NWs applications. Finally we attempt to look into the future and discuss our opinion regarding the upcoming trends in NW research.