Synthesis, Phase Selection and Measurement Technique Development Studies in 1D Metal Silicide and Metal Sulfide Nanostructures

Nanoscience and nanotechnology has pushed our understanding of several fundamental physical processes that are involved at the nanometer scale compared to those that occur at larger scales. One such nanomaterial morphology that has shown possibility for observing such processes is a nanowire (NW). Many technological applications such as thermoelectrics, solar energy conversion, optoelectronics, and spintronics can potentially take advantage of the reduced dimensions of a NW to improve their performance and realize fundamentally novel physical phenomenon that can only occur at the nanometer length scale. However, these improved and novel phenomenons will continue to be limited by our ability to selectively synthesize NWs, a skill that is continuously being pursued for many materials systems. One such group of technologically interesting material is metal silicides, which are a class of intermetallic compounds composed of abundant elements that are currently being employed in a large range of technological applications. In addition to being limited by our ability to synthesize NWs, studies of many fundamental and technologically relevant physical properties of NWs are also limited by a lack of NW characterization techniques to directly study several key properties. This dissertation therefore describes the work and contribution in these areas of nanoscience and nanotechnology. This work discusses strategies for improved synthesis of metal silicide NWs using conversion reactions, specifically higher manganese silicide (HMS) and barium silicide (BaSi2) NWs, and provide preliminary characterization of their thermoelectric and solar applications. This work also discusses the efforts made for the development of a new NW characterization technique that has allowed direct measurement, extraction and studies of new semiconducting properties, an ability previously unavailable for a NW.