Ultrafine Single-Crystalline Gold Nanowire Arrays by Oriented Attachment

The mechanism of templateless growth of anisotropic nanostructures consisting of high-symmetry crystals is an important fundamental problem with technological consequences.The bottom-up approach for building nanostructures relies on the ability to produce shape-controlled building blocks and their subsequent assembly into mesoscale architectures. Onedimensional nanostructures in the form of nanowires and nanorods are especially important building blocks owing to the multitude of interesting properties that they exhibit. The literature is replete with techniques for producing high-quality semiconductor nanowires with controlled diameters and roughness for potential use as biosensors, logic circuits, field-effect transistors, and nonvolatile memory elements.