Nanoscale semiconductor-insulator-metal core/shell heterostructures: facile synthesis and light emission.

Controllably constructing hierarchical nanostructures with distinct components and designed architectures is an important theme of research in nanoscience, entailing novel but reliable approaches of bottom-up synthesis. Here, we report a facile method to reproducibly create semiconductor-insulator-metal core/shell nanostructures, which involves first coating uniform MgO shells onto metal oxide nanostructures in solution and then decorating them with Au nanoparticles. The semiconductor nanowire core can be almost any material and, herein, ZnO, SnO(2) and In(2)O(3) are used as examples. We also show that linear chains of short ZnO nanorods embedded in MgO nanotubes and porous MgO nanotubes can be obtained by taking advantage of the reduced thermal stability of the ZnO core. Furthermore, after MgO shell-coating and the appropriate annealing treatment, the intensity of the ZnO near-band-edge UV emission becomes much stronger, showing a 25-fold enhancement. The intensity ratio of the UV/visible emission can be increased further by decorating the surface of the ZnO/MgO nanowires with high-density plasmonic Au nanoparticles. These heterostructured semiconductor-insulator-metal nanowires with tailored morphologies and enhanced functionalities have great potential for use as nanoscale building blocks in photonic and electronic applications.

A template and catalyst-free metal-etching-oxidation method to synthesize aligned oxide nanowire arrays: NiO as an example.

Although NiO is one of the canonical functional binary oxides, there has been no report so far on the effective fabrication of aligned single crystalline NiO nanowire arrays. Here we report a novel vapor-based metal-etching-oxidation method to synthesize high-quality NiO nanowire arrays with good vertical alignment and morphology control. In this method, Ni foils are used as both the substrates and the nickel source; NiCl(2) powder serves as the additional Ni source and provides Cl(2) to initiate mild etching. No template is deliberately employed; instead a nanograined NiO scale formed on the NiO foil guides the vapor infiltration and assists the self-assembled growth of NiO nanowires via a novel process comprising simultaneous Cl(2) etching and gentle oxidation. Furthermore, using CoO nanowires and Co-doped NiO as examples, we show that this general method can be employed to produce nanowires of other oxides as well as the doped counterparts.

Highly efficient avalanche multiphoton luminescence from coupled Au nanowires in the visible region.

We demonstrate highly efficient avalanche multiphoton luminescence (MPL) from ordered-arrayed gold nanowires (NWs) with low time-average excitation intensity, Iexc (5.0-9.1 kW/cm2). The intensity of avalanche MPL, IMPL, is about 10(4) times larger than that of three-photon luminescence, the slope partial differential log IMPL/ partial differential log Iexc of avalanche MPL reaches as high as 18.3, and the corresponding polarization dependence of IMPL has a form of cos50 phip. The emission dynamics of avalanche MPL and three-photon luminescence are also studied comparatively. These observations indicate that the highly efficient avalanche MPL is attributed to the giant enhancement and coupling of longitudinal surface plasmon resonance of ordered-arrayed gold NWs.