Nanowires

5 March 2007

Nanowires exhibits important quantum mechanical effects and therefore these are also known as quantum wire. In nanowires, the lateral size of the structure is restricted to a few nanometer, however there is no restriction along longitudinal size.

The aspect ration in a typical nanowire is more than 1000. As the ration of length to width in nanowires is too high, a nanowire is also referred as 1-diamensional materials. Due to these restricted dimensional characteristics, the properties of nanowires are different and these can be used in various spheres of life. Many different types of nanowires exists such as Ni, Pt, (metallic nanowires) Si, GaN (semi conducting nanowires) and SiO2, TiO2 (insulating nanowires).

These nanowires can be used as components in nanotechnology for electronic, opto-electronic and nano electrochemical devices. At present the study on these nanowires is at preliminary stage only, however it has been established that these can significantly increase the performance of next generation computing devices. Both n-type and p-type semiconductors have been prepared by chemically doping these nanowires.

The scientists are able to dope these nanowires in such a way that the resultant nanowire is a p-n junction. The p-n junction was produced separately by physically joining two different nanowires p-type and n-type nanowires as well as chemically doping a single nanowire with two different dopants so the resultant nanowire acts as a p-n junction. These p-n junction were further connected together to form logic circuits and some of the basic logic gates such as NOR, OR and NOT has successfully been built.

So, it seems that the future of various electrical and electronics circuits will used nanowires. The advanced instrumentation will be based on some of the simple electronic devices made from semiconductor nanowires. Scientists in major countries are exploring the utilization of these nanowires for other applications as well.

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