Novelty and versatility of self-catalytic nanowire growth: A case study with InN nanowires

Various novel features have been discussed of the self-catalytic nanowire growth technique with application to InN nanowire growths. It is hard to grow InN nanowires due to the very low dissociation temperature (500–600°C) of InN and the very low dissociation rate of NH3 at this low temperature. However, scanning electron microscopy images show that the self-catalytic technique very efficiently produced long, uniform, single-crystal InN nanowires. Unlike most other methods, the technique is also versatile enough to produce a wide variety of nanowires standing and lying on the substrates. It is also useful to grow nanowires by the conventional vapor-liquid-solid formalism. Energy-dispersive spectroscopy showed that the composition of the nanowires is that of InN. X-ray diffraction patterns indicated that these nanowires had a pure hexagonal wurtzite structure.