Nanowire Growth
Recent developments in growth technology have enabled scientists to fabricate and grow nanowires of different size, shape and structure. This technology even allows them to control the materials at different locations along and across the nanowires. This is especially helpful when they need to fabricate nano scale heterostructures and hybrid nano scale devices such as a single quantum dot embedded inside a p-n junction to create a single photon LED.
Most of the semiconducting nanowires are grown by vopor-liquid-solid (VLS) process originally suggested and investigated more than 40 years ago by Wagner and Ellis[reference?]. In this technique, the semiconductor material is supplied as a gas and is absorbed by liquid nanoparticles of an appropriate catalytic material, such as gold. These nanodroplets located at the nanowire dips, serve as seeds for nanowire growth and also determine the diameters of the nanowires. The semiconductor material condenses at the interface between the droplet and the nanowire, thereby extending the length of the nanowire. In the VLS technique the liquid droplet consists not only of the catalytic material but also of a certain amount of semiconductor material.
This is because the mixed material has a much lower melting temperature that each of the two constituents. The lowest possible melting temperature for a specific composition is called the eutectic temperature. [SCIENCE VOL 316 4 MAY 2007 (finish this reference, author and page)]

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