Growth of SrGaGe Nanowires by Thermal Annealing

SrGaGe is a type-I clathrate and displays glass-like thermal conductivities along with good charge carrier mobility, which makes it an interesting material for thermoelectric research. SrGaGe one dimensional nanostructures gained considerable interest due to even lower thermal conductivity. In nanowires, the lattice contribution to thermal conductivity approaches the amorphous limit for buck materials. In this paper, we report a simple fabrication technique for making large quantities of SrGaGe wires with diameters ranging from 30 nm to 80 nm. The nanowires showed strong preferential growth with gold catalyst presented. Presented here are the growth conditions and images of the resulting wires that were fabricated. The products are characterized by Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM).