Growing up is not easy, especially for tiny nanowires: With no support or guidance, nanowires become unruly, making it difficult to harness their full potential as effective semiconductors.
Prof. Ernesto Joselevich of the Weizmann Institute’s Chemistry Faculty has found a way to grow semiconductor nanowires out, not up, on a surface, providing, for the first time, the much-needed guidance to produce relatively long, orderly, aligned structures. Since semiconductors with controlled structures are at the core of the most advanced technologies, this new research will hopefully enable the production of semiconductor nanostructures with enhanced electronic and optical properties, suitable for a wide range of applications including LEDs, lasers, information storage media, transistors, computers, photovoltaics and more.