ZnO nanowires and nanobelts: Shape selection and thermodynamic modeling

Abstract

The authors show that, during a steady-state vapor phase growth of ZnO nanomaterials, indium doping causes the structural change from usual [0001]-axial short nanowires to [112¯0]-axial nanobelts of much larger aspect ratio. They used an analytical thermodynamic model based on geometric summation of the Gibbs free energy to predict the dimension dependence of the nanowires and nanobelts for both pure and In-doped ZnO. The calculation result agrees with the experiment observation that in situ indium doping influences the nucleation and supports the dominating growth of a-axial nanobelts over c-axial nanowires.