Abstract
Since the discovery of carbon nanotubes in 1991 (ref. 1), there have been significant research efforts to synthesize nanometre-scale tubular forms of various solids2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10. The formation of tubular nanostructure generally requires a layered or anisotropic crystal structure2,3,4. There are reports5,6,11 of nanotubes made from silica, alumina, silicon and metals that do not have a layered crystal structure; they are synthesized by using carbon nanotubes and porous membranes as templates, or by thin-film rolling. These nanotubes, however, are either amorphous, polycrystalline or exist only in ultrahigh vacuum8. The growth of single-crystal semiconductor hollow nanotubes would be advantageous in potential nanoscale electronics, optoelectronics and biochemical-sensing applications. Here we report an ‘epitaxial casting’ approach for the synthesis of single-crystal GaN nanotubes with inner diameters of 30–200 nm and wall thicknesses of 5–50 nm. Hexagonal ZnO nanowires were used as templates for the epitaxial overgrowth of thin GaN layers in a chemical vapour deposition system. The ZnO nanowire templates were subsequently removed by thermal reduction and evaporation, resulting in ordered arrays of GaN nanotubes on the substrates. This templating process should be applicable to many other semiconductor systems.
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Acknowledgements
We thank the National Center for Electron Microscopy for the use of their facilities. This work was supported by the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, the Research Corporation, the Hellman Family Faculty Foundation and the Beckman Foundation. J.G. thanks the National Science Foundation for Graduate Fellowship support. P.Y. is an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. Work at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory was supported by the Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Science of the US Department of Energy.
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Goldberger, J., He, R., Zhang, Y. et al. Single-crystal gallium nitride nanotubes. Nature 422, 599–602 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01551
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01551
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