Nanocrystalline cadmium selenide (nc-CdSe) nanowires were prepared using the lithographically patterned nanowire electrodeposition method. Arrays of 350 linear nc-CdSe nanowires with lateral dimensions of 60 nm (h) × 200 nm (w) were patterned at 5 μm pitch on glass. nc-CdSe nanowires electrodeposited from aqueous solutions at 25 °C had a mean grain diameter, d(ave), of 5 nm. A combination of three methods was used to increase d(ave) to 10, 20, and 100 nm: (1) The deposition bath was heated to 75 °C, (2) nanowires were thermally annealed at 300 °C, and (3) nanowires were exposed to methanolic CdCl(2) followed by thermal annealing at 300 °C. The morphology, chemical composition, grain diameter, and photoconductivity of the resulting nanowires were studied as a function of d(ave). As d(ave) was increased from 10 to 100 nm, the photoconductivity response of the nanowires was modified in two ways: First, the measured photoconductive gain, G, was elevated from G = 0.017 (d(ave) = 5 nm) to ∼4.9 (100 nm), a factor of 290. Second, the photocurrent rise time was increased from 8 μs for d(ave) = 10 nm to 8 s for 100 nm, corresponding to a decrease by a factor of 1 million of the photoconduction bandwidth from 44 kHz to 44 mHz.
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