A new twist on nanowires
Nanowires — microscopic fibers that can be “grown” in the lab — are a hot research topic today, with a variety of potential applications including light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and sensors. Now, a team of MIT researchers has found a way of precisely controlling the width and composition of these tiny strands as they grow, making it possible to grow complex structures that are optimally designed for particular applications.The results are described in a new paper authored by MIT assistant professor of materials science and engineering Silvija Gradečak and her team, published in the journal Nano Letters.Nanowires have been of great interest because structures with such tiny dimensions — typically just a few tens of nanometers, or billionths of a meter, in diameter — can have very different properties than the same materials have in their larger form. That’s in part because at such minuscule scales, quantum confinement effects — based...