Controllable growth of a forest of silver nanowires and their field emission properties

The development and innovation of strategies for the fabrication of oriented nanostructures has been among the hot research topics in the field of nanoscience because of the novel properties of these nano-arrays, that differ drastically from their bulk counterparts, and their potential applications in many areas including the chemical, physical, biological and engineering fields. Herein, we have demonstrated an extremely simple procedure for the fabrication of a forest of oriented silver nanowires at ambient temperature in aqueous solution without a hard template. The oriented silver nanowire arrays exhibit better field emission performance than that of a single nanowire or non-oriented nanowires. By variation of the experimental parameters, the diameter and length of the oriented Ag nanowires can be tuned accordingly. The successful fabrication of a forest of the oriented nanowires under mild conditions without a template not only provides an efficient route to selectively control the preparation of oriented nano-arrays, but also provides new insights into the underlying surfactant-mediated mechanism of nano- and micro-architectures. This strategy might be extended to fabricate other metal and semiconductor nanocrystal arrays and widen their potential applications in many fields.