Preparation Of One-dimensional Silver Tellurium Nanostructures And Their Electrical Properties

Metal tellurides have received considerable attention because of their potentialapplications in electronics, optoelectronics, and thermoelectrics as well as in biologicaland magnetic sensors. Among these tellurides, silver telluride may find applications inmanufacture of magnetic find measurements, memory devices, and optics materials.The straight single crystal silver telluride nanowires and nanotubes with thediameter of about200nm and length up to micrometers of decades have been preparedby the hydrothermal process without any template or any surfactant. XRD, SEM, XPS,TEM/HRTEM and Raman reveal that the as-synthesized products are high purity andwell-crystallized. The reversible structural phase transition from the low-temperaturemonoclinic structure to the high-temperature face-centered cubic structure wasobserved by DSC, and the causes on the mechanism of the phase transition wasanalysed in detail.In particular, the electrical properties of individual Ag2Te nanowires wereinvestigated by the voltammetric technique for the first time where I–V curves wereclearly nonlinear and symmetrical with respect to both axes. Furthermore, the drasticreduction in electrical current around the phase transition temperature in the nanowireis discovered, paving further studies for fabrication of one-dimensional nanoscaledevices.