A New Approach for Establishing Electrical Contacts to a Nanowire Array as Applied to Gas Sensing

We report on the design of a novel nanowire gas sensing device utilizing vertically oriented zinc oxide nanowires grown on a gold catalyst layer through a direct thermal evaporation process at 550 °C. Electrical contact to the top of the nanowire assembly was established through a novel approach of electrostatic attachment of conductive nanoparticles exclusively to the tip of the nanowires, non-destructively. A gas-sensing device was constructed using this arrangement and found to be sensitive to methanol and nitrous oxide at 325 °C.