Abstract
Novel silica nanowires and interconnected nanorings were firstly synthesized on a graphite paper by typical thermal catalytic chemical vapor deposition method, using silicon and carbon black powders as raw materials. The field emission scanning electron microscopy, energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and transmission electron microscopy were used to investigate the composition and structure characterization, which indicates that the silica nanowires and interconnected nanorings were amorphous. The growth of the as-prepared silica nanowires and interconnected nanorings was related to the vapor-liquid-solid mechanism, but the nanowire-ring structure may be due to the polycentric nucleation and periodic stable growth with gradual direction changes. The room temperature photoluminescence emission spectrum showed that the silica nanostructures emitted strong blue light at 460 nm, resulting from the combination of neutral oxygen vacancy (≡Si-Si≡) and selftrapped excitons. The as-synthesized novel silica nanowires and interconnected nanorings could be a potential candidate for applications in future light-emitting diodes and optoelectronic nanodevices.
Highlights
One dimensional (1D) nanostructured materials have attracted worldwide intense attention due to their novel optical and electrical properties, and owned potential applications in the integrated energy storage, sensors, photonics, and electronics devices[1,2,3,4,5]
As it can be seen, a small dark droplet is at the top of the NW, and the element composition is detected to be Si, O, and Al, which suggests that the Al plays an important role in initial nucleation and further growth of the amorphous silica NWs and interconnected nanorings (ICNRs). These results indicate that the growth process of the amorphous silica nanostructures in our study could be explained by vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism, which has been put forward by Wagner and Ellis[34]
The growth of the silica nanowires are related to the normal vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism with monocentric nucleation and periodic stable growth process
Summary
One dimensional (1D) nanostructured materials have attracted worldwide intense attention due to their novel optical and electrical properties, and owned potential applications in the integrated energy storage, sensors, photonics, and electronics devices[1,2,3,4,5]. On the other hand, various methods have been applied to assemble the as-prepared nanostructures into desired architectures for the practical needs of nanophotonics and nanoelectronics, and reported many exciting nano-micro-scale structures for function oxides (MgO, ZnO, SnO, and SiOx), like fish bones, combs, dendrite spines, bridges, and windmills[13,14,15,16,17] Among these functional nanostructures, silica nanowires are important optical materials for potential application in low dimensional wave-guides for future integrated optical devices and high-resolution optical heads of scanning near-field optical microscopes, due to their intense and stable emission[18, 19]. We think this study could provide a new way to synthesize novel morphology nanostructures of silica and other oxide or non-oxide materials for the application of new generation nano-devices with tunable photoelectric performance
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