| Abstract: | One-dimensional semiconductor nanowires are a promising candidate for future electronic devices. The epitaxial growth of nanowires
is often mediated by metal seed particles, usually gold particles. In this paper the setup of a simple and robust technique
to generate nanometer-sized aerosol gold particles by spark discharge is described. Furthermore we demonstrate for the first
time that particles generated by spark discharge can be used to design advanced nanoelectronic structures, namely nanowires.
In order to obtain compact, spherical particles suitable for nanowire growth, the sparkgenerated agglomerate particles were
reshaped in a special compaction furnace. The reshaped particles were used to seed the growth of epitaxial GaP and InP nanowires,
by metal organic vapor phase epitaxy, which was shown to be a reliable and reproducible method. This work indicates the possibility
of using spark-discharge generated gold particles for the creation of new electronic devices even at large scale processing. |
