Gold nanorods with aspect ratios of from 1 （particles） to 31.6 were synthesized by the seed-mediated method and packed in a highly ordered structure on a large scale on silicon substrates through capillary force induced self-assembly behaviour during solvent evaporation. The gold nanorod surface exhibits a strong enhancing effect on Raman scattering spectroscopy. The enhancement of Raman scattering for two model molecules （2-naphthalenethiol and rhodamine 6C） is about 5-6 orders of magnitude. By changing the aspect ratio of the Au nanorods, we found that the enhancement factors decreased with the increase of aspect ratios. The observed Raman scattering enhancement is strong and should be ascribed to the surface plasmon coupling between closely packed nanorods, which may result in huge local electromagnetic field enhancements in those confined junctions.
The controllable growth of three different morphologies of AlN nanostructures （nanorod, nanotip and nanocrater） arrays are successfully realized by using chemical vapour deposition （CVD） technology. All three nanostructures are of single crystal h-AlN with a growth orientation of [001]. Their growth is attributed to the vapour-liquid-solid （VLS） mechanism. To investigate the factors affecting field emission （FE） properties of AlN nanostructures, we compare their FE behaviours in several aspects. Experimental results show that AIN nanocrater arrays possess the best FE properties, such as a threshold field of 7.2 V/μm and an emission current fluctuation lower than 4%. Moreover, the three AlN nanostructures all have good field emission properties compared with a number of other excellent cathode nanomaterials, which suggests that they are future promising FE nanomaterials.
The A1N nanostructures with a wide band-gap of 6.28 eV are considered as ideal cold cathode materials because of their low electron-affinity. Many methods have been devoted to fabricating A1N nanostructures, but high growth temperature over 800℃ and the use of the catalysts in most methods limit their practical application and result in their poor field-emission behaviours in uniformity. This paper reports that without any catalysts, a simple chemical vapour deposition method is used to synthesize aligned A1N nanocone arrays at 550℃ on silicon substrate or indium tin oxide glass. Field emission measurements show that these nanocones prepared at low temperature have an average turn-on field of 6 V/μm and a threshold field of 11.7 V/μm as well as stable emission behaviours at high field, which suggests that they have promising applications in field emission area.
Single crystalline boron nanocones are prepared by using a simple spin spread method in which Fe3O4 nanoparticles are pre-manipulated on Si（lll） to form catalyst patterns of different densities. The density of boron nanocones can be tuned by changing the concentration of catalyst nanoparticles. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy analysis shows that the boron nanocone has a β-tetragonal structure with good crystallization. The field emission behaviour is optimal when the spacing distance is close to the nanocone length, which indicates that this simple spin spread method has great potential applications in electron emission nanodevices.
