Figure 6. The formation of continuous or discrete island-chain nanowires.

(a) Plateau-Rayleigh instability of the Sn catalyst droplets, under stretching, is recorded upon the as-produced SiNWs, leads to continuous or discrete island-chain geometry depending on whether, the criterion for P-R transformation; (b) Presents a statistics of the continuous or discrete island-chain SiNWs, with or without guiding step edges, grown with two a-Si:H layer thicknesses of h_a=30 and 60 nm, respectively, as marked by the blue and the green dashed circles; (c) Provides the typical s.e.m. of the discrete Si dots structure. Scale bar, 200 nm.