Metal oxide nano-crystals for gas sensing

This review article is focused on the description of metal oxide single crystalline nanostructures used for gas sensing. Metal oxide nanowires are crystalline structures with precise chemical composition, surface terminations, and dislocation-defect free. Their nanosized dimension generate properties that can be significantly different from their coarse-grained polycrystalline counterpart. Surface effects appear because of the magnification in the specific surface of nanostructures, leading to an enhancement of the properties related to that, such as catalytic activity or surface adsorption. Properties that are basic phenomenon underlying solid-state gas sensors. Their use as gas-sensing materials should reduce instabilities, suffered from their polycrystalline counterpart, associated with grain coalescence and drift in electrical properties. High degree of crystallinity and atomic sharp terminations make them very promising for better understanding of sensing principles and for development of a new generation of gas sensors. These sensing nano-crystals can be used as resistors, in FET based or optical based gas sensors. The gas experiments presented confirm good sensing properties, the possibility to use dopants and catalyser such in thin film gas sensors and the real integration in low power consumption transducers of single crystalline nanobelts prove the feasibility of large scale manufacturing of well-organized sensor arrays based on different nanostructures. Nevertheless, a greater control in the growth is required for an application in commercial systems, together with a thorough understanding of the growth mechanism that can lead to a control in nano-wires size and size distributions, shape, crystal structure and atomic termination. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.