Romanian Reports in Physics, Vol. 58, No. 2, P. 183–188, 2006 PREPARATION OF METAL CHALCOGENIDES SEMICONDUCTOR NANOWIRES AND MICROTUBES M. SIMA 1 , I. ENCULESCU 1 , E. VASILE 2 1 National Institute of Materials Physics, Bucharest-Magurele, Romania, e-mail: msima@infimro 2 METAV-CD, Bucharest, Romania (Received May 9, 2005) Abstract. Recently, a great deal of attention has been paid to the fabrication of highly ordered nanowire arrays because of their fundamental importance and potential applications. We fabricated CdS:Mn 2+ :Cu + nano and microwires and PbTe and PbSe nanowires and microtubes using electrochemical deposition and template method. The morphology of nanowires and microtubes was observed by scanning electron microscopy and the composition of these semiconductor nanostructures was measured by energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX). Key words: template synthesis, electrodeposition, semiconductor nanowires and microtubes. 1. INTRODUCTION The template synthesis is a simple and versatile method for preparing nanostructural material [1–4]. This method consists in filling the pores of a membrane with a certain material, which adopts the exact shape of the hosting pore. Two templates are mostly employed: anodic alumina prepared by anodizing aluminium and etched ion track membranes prepared by heavy ion irradiation and chemical etching. This latter technique for preparation of membranes has the advantage that each projectile creates an individual damage trail of a few nanometers in diameter. The length of the resulting ion track is determined by the ion energy and can reach several hundred μm. By chemical etching, tracks can be enlarged to pores of different sizes and extremely high aspect ratios (up to 10 4 ). Moreover, many materials can be structured such as, for example, polymers (e.g., Polyethylenetereftalate, Polyimide and Polycarbonate) and inorganic crystals such as mica, glass or quartz. Thus, by electrochemical and chemical deposition in etched ion track membranes, metallic and semiconducting structures with lengths up to tens of micrometers and diameters down to several nanometers have been prepared. The electrochemical synthesis in templates has been taken as one of the most efficient methods in controlling the growth of nanowires because the growth is controllable almost exclusively in the direction normal to the surface.