Controlled growth and characterization methods of semiconductor nanomaterials.

One-dimensional (1D) semiconductor nanomaterials attract much attention because they are ideal systems for investigation and studying the relationship between properties and structures and having extensive application future in the high technical field. They are expected to play an important role in fabrication of the next generation nanocircuits, nanotools, nanowires lasers, photon tunneling devices, near-field photo-waveguide devices, etc. This article described controlled growth, characterization of structures and morphologies and properties of 1D semiconductor nanomaterials based on our previous works. This article is organized into two parts: The first part is complicated nanostructures of semiconductors, which includes coaxial nanocables, heterostructure nanowires and nanowires with metal-semiconductor junction behavior, hierarchical structures, doping of the nanowires and nanobelts, porous materials and periodically twined nanowires and asymmetrical polytypic nanobelts. The second part contains semiconductor nanoarrays based on anodic alumina membrane (AAM) templates. Finally, we propose that further investigation of the influence of nanomaterial morphologies on properties and how to design the morphology of nanostructures to meet the property requirements of nanodevices are our future research directions in this field.