Study on fabrication and characterization of single CuO nanowire devices

CuO nanowire is an important one-dimensional semiconductor nano-material which can be used in field effect transistors, photovoltaic cells, field emission nanodevices, and chemical and gas sensors. In this paper, CuO nanowires are synthesized by heating copper substrates in air, and the CuO nanowire is assembled on two opposite microelectrodes to fabricate a single CuO nanowire nanodevice by dielectrophoresis (DEP). In experiment, suitable parameters are chosen, such as concentration of the CuO nanowire solution, applied voltage and frequency on the microelectrodes, time of DEP duration, to assemble a single CuO nanowire on the microelectrode. Using this single nanowire nanodevice, this paper measured FET effect and photoconductivity of the single CuO nanowire. The results show that the single CuO nanowire nanodevice can work as a FET and it also has novel sensitivity to light intensity.