University of Illinois researcher Xiuling Li, associate professor in electrical and computer engineering, along with Kyoung Jin Choi, associate professor at the Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea, have led a team that successfully demonstrated uniform wafer-scale III-V nanowire growth on silicon. The research team developed a novel method to epitaxially grow structurally and compositionally homogeneous and spatially and spectrally uniform ternary nanowires on silicon at wafer-scale using metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD). Previously, a common method for creating nanowires was using Au-assisted Vapor-Liquid-Solid synthesis, but that can cause significant degradation of the quality of the semiconductor nanowires. The team expects their effort to help further research in renewable energy, as it could lead to "high-efficiency and low-cost large-scale solar cells," according to Prof. Choi. This research was published in ACS Nano, DOI: 10.1021/nn4014774.