Simultaneous inducing synthesis of semiconductor selenium nanorods and nanochains by garlic roots for live template

In this article, multi-armed nanorods and nanochains of semiconductor selenium were simultaneously synthesised through living bio-membrane bi-templates of garlic at room temperature. The multi-armed nanorods are 60–80 nm in diameter and 1.0–1.5 µm in length; the nanochains are made of a series of nanospheres and each nanosphere is 100–150 nm in its diameter. The X-ray diffraction pattern indicates that these nanocrystals were crystallised in the hexagonal structure and were of high purity. The possible formation mechanism is investigated in the article. It is expected the method reported here can be easily adapted to any future preparation of low-dimension nanomaterials.