CuO nanowire synthesis catalyzed by a CoWP nanofilter

Abstract This paper presents a new approach to synthesizing self-aligned, uniform single-crystal cupric oxide (CuO) nanowires on a Cu-based multilayer on SiO 2 /Si. The key is to introduce CoWP as a nanofilter to catalyze CuO-nanowire synthesis simply by calcination at 400 °C in air. The CuO nanowires (diameter: 10–50 nm, length: 7 μm) exhibit low resistivity (10–60 Ω cm), a low turn-on field (4.5 V μm −1 ) and a high field-enhancement factor (∼1400).