Assessing the electrical activity of individual ZnO nanowires thermally annealed in air.

ZnO nanowires (NWs) are very attractive for a wide range of nanotechnological applications owing to their tunable electron concentration structural and surface defect engineering. A 2D electrical profiling of these defects is necessary to understand their restructuring dynamics during engineering processes. Our work proposes the exploration of individual ZnO NWs, dispersed on a SiO/p-Si substrate without any embedding matrix, along their axial direction using scanning capacitance microscopy (SCM), which is a useful tool for 2D carrier profiling.