A lift-off way to fabricate patterned aligned W18O49 nanowire arrays with high field emission performances

For the application of field emission (FE), W₁₈O₄₉ nanostructures have exhibited excellent FE behaviors among tungsten oxides, which promise a much better future. However, many difficulties remain to be overcome in their application in devices. One of them is that synthesis of nanostructures in uniform W₁₈O₄₉ phase is difficult; tungsten oxides have tens of different phases, which can results in their poor uniformity in their physical and chemical properties. Secondly, selected-area controlled growth of W₁₈O₄₉ nanowire arrays is another technical challenge. The last is that it is hard to find a simple and low-cost way to fabricate high yield of W₁₈O₄₉ nanowire arrays. The existence of these difficulties has held back their further development in device applications. Thus, creating a new and simple approach to synthesize patterned W₁₈O₄₉ nanostructures in vertically arrays is of crucial importance. Here, we report the selected-area growth of W₁₈O₄₉ nanowire on large-area pixel arrays by a simple lift-off way.