Patterned growth of AlN nanowires and investigation on their field emission properties

AlN nanowires have low electron affinity, which has been considered as one of the ideal cathode materials in future. Although many methods have been developed to prepare AlN nanowires with different morphologies, little effort is found to focus on the patterned growth technique, which has limited their applicaitions. Here we provide a ceramic template method to fabricate patterned AlN nanowire arrays, which have better field emission performance than the continuous nanowire film.