A low-temperature aqueous solution route to large-scale growth of ZnO nanowire arrays

A low-temperature template-free aqueous solution route has been successfully employed to fabricate large-scale arrays of highly oriented ZnO nanowires. It is found that the growth of the highly oriented ZnO nanowire arrays is dependent on the reaction time, leading to our proposal on the possible formation mechanism. The obtained ZnO nanowires are single crystalline and have a low defect concentration. Furthermore, the ZnO nanowires exhibit significant optical properties in photoluminescence (PL) emission spectroscopy and Raman spectrum, suggesting that they could find promising potential for opto-electronic application.