Introduction to the Issue on Nanowires

Nanowires are considered as building blocks for the next generation of electronics, photonics, energy, sensors, and biomedical applications. One-dimensional nanowire structures offer unique opportunities to control properties of semiconductors such as density of states, transport of electrons and photons. Another important feature of nanowires is to enable the growth of heterostructures of materials with large lattice and thermal mismatch without creating dislocations. This provides an unprecedented flexibility to create a broad range of structures with a combination of materials for a variety of applications. Nanowires may lead to the integration of microelectronic devices on silicon with optoelectronic and photonic devices based on compound semiconductors.