Furry LEDs in the making

As a first step to designing densely packed arrays of nanowire-sized LEDs, a team of researchers from Berlin-based Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik (PDI) have used a titanium foil as a flexible substrate to grow impeccably detached and vertically aligned GaN nanowires. Grown through plasma–assisted molecular beam epitaxy, the nanowires they obtained exhibited a similar crystalline perfection, a lower degree of coalescence, a higher concentration of stacking faults, and a reduced density of inversion domain boundaries than those prepared on Si substrates, they reported.