Search

Large-scale WO3 nanowire patterns have been successfully fabricated on a 3.5 inch glass substrate at atmospheric pressure by a simple no-catalyst method. The nanowires were observed to have a mean length of about 40 μm, and their aspect ratio reaches 200. The nanowires were proven to be single crystalline WO3 with a monoclinic structure. It is found that the growth region and growth density of the WO3 nanowires differ with the interval or the width of the W stripes. By combination of designing a series of experiments and analyzing the growth kinetics theory, a novel self-supported vapor–solid (SVS) mechanism is proposed to be responsible for the formation of WO3 nanowires. Field emission (FE) measurements show that the WO3 nanowire patterns have excellent FE performance, which have a low turn-on field of 2.9 V μm−1 and good field emission uniformity of over 85%. Moreover, this SVS method may provide a helpful reference on low-temperature and no-catalyst growth of other metal oxide nanostructure arrays at atmospheric pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]