Template-assisted growth of rhodium nanowire contacts to silicon nanowires

Nanoscale materials are attracting growing interest due to their fascinating properties compared to the corresponding bulk materials, such as high effective surface area, catalytic activity and quantum confinement. Silicon nanowires, in particular, received much of this interest due to their promising applications in nano-electronics and nano-optoelectronics. Template synthesis, which involves a deposition into the nanopores of a nanoporous template, is considered among the easiest and least expensive approaches to fabricate nanowires with uniform diameters over a large area. More interestingly, it opens an opportunity to confine a nanocontact in the template's pores via a sequentional deposition of different materials. Herein, we describe a templatebased approach to fabricate metallic nanowire contacts to silicon nanowires. The metallic part of the nanowire (herein is rhodium) was deposited electrochemically within the pores of the template. However, the other (silicon) part was grown using the metal-catalysed vapour-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism. The influence of the growth parameters on the structural quality of the nanowire was addressed.