Novel flower-like hyperbranched ZnTe nanostructures prepared via catalyst-assisted vacuum thermal evaporation

Novel flower-like hyperbranched ZnTe nanostructures were prepared by catalyst-assisted vacuum thermal evaporation method. Various analysis techniques including X-ray diffraction (XRD), energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDS), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM), high-resolution transmission electron microscopy (HRTEM) and selected area electronic diffraction (SAED) were conducted on the as-prepared products. The XRD analysis demonstrates the ZnTe nanostructures are high pure single crystalline of zinc-blende structure. These novel ZnTe nanostructures are grown by a combination of the vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) growth mechanism and screw-dislocation-driven mechanism. The nanostructures formed by VLS mechanism have smaller sizes of several to ten micrometers and secondary branches with diameters of 100 nm. The nanostructures combined VLS and screw-dislocation-driven growth mechanism have a diagonal size of 40 µm and they consist of quartic branches, among which the secondary branches are spiral. The stems of the nanostructures with no-spiral secondary branches and their branches of the two kinds of nanostructures are all capped by a spherical catalyst particle, which is an indication of VLS growth mechanism. These as-prepared ZnTe nanostructures perhaps have potential applications in optoelectronics due to their unique geometric configurations.