Excellent gas sensing and optical properties of single-crystalline cadmium sulfide nanowires

The chemical and optical properties of 1D single-crystalline cadmium sulfide (CdS) nanowires (NWs) synthesized by a solvothermal method were discussed systematically. The CdS NW was characterized using different analytical techniques. In our work, CdS was employed as the active nanomaterial to detect ethanol gas for the first time and showed good gas sensing performance. Especially, the fast response (0.4 s) and recovery speed (0.2 s) to 100 ppm ethanol were much faster than the reported values. The visible-light detector based on CdS NWs demonstrated ultrafast decay speed (3.77 ms), which was the fastest in the reported photodetectors (PDs) based on randomly oriented CdS NW networks. This research indicates that the CdS NW is an excellent nanomaterial for high performance gas sensors and PDs.