Abstract
Aluminum nitride, an important member of the group III nitrides with a bandgap of about 6.2 eV, is an attractive material for electronic substrates or for packaging, high-tempera-ture, structural, or refractory materials. It is also a perfect substrate for epitaxial growth of GaN-based heterostructures due to its small lattice mismatch with GaN. Along with their possible applications in the field of nanotechnology, ID nanostruc-tural AlN materials may find wider applications in many other areas. Compared with GaN ID nanostructures (nanowires, nanorods, and nanotubes), AlN ID nanostructures have received much less attention. AlN nanoparticles and nanowires have been synthesized by several routes, such as carbon-assisted thermal evaporation, nanotube-templated growth, and hydrothermal reaction. The synthesis of AlN nanotubes, however, is more challenging and there are only two papers concerning polycrystalline cubic AlN nanotubes; the synthesis of single-crystalline cubic AlN nanotubes has not been report-ed.