Professor Voorhees of Northwestern University’s Department of Materials Science came to the University of Illinois Champaign-Urbana to discuss his research into vapor-liquid-solid nanowire growth. Faculty and students, alike learned new techniques and analysis methods. His group used video-rate lattice-resolved environmental transmission electron microscopy to show in-situ the nanowire growth interface during growth. He found that, due to the nanowire geometry, a single twin boundary is located at the nanowire center. This twin acts as a preferential nucleation site from which the nanowire grows. He also discussed a model that he used to demonstrate the manner in which the catalyst droplet becomes unstable and compared the predictions of this simulation to experimental observations.
