Electrochim Acta 2007, 52:5606.CrossRef 38. Wang J-Y, Zhang H-X, Jiang K, Cai W-B: From HCOOH to CO at Pd electrodes: a surface-enhanced infrared spectroscopy study. J

Am Chem Soc 2011, 133:14876.CrossRef 39. Zhou Y, Liu J, Ye J, Zou Z, Ye J, Gu J, Yu T, Yang A: Poisoning and regeneration of Pd catalyst in direct formic acid fuel cell. Electrochim Acta 2010, 55:5024.CrossRef Competing interests The authors declare that they have no competing interests. Authors’ contributions CHsu and FL designed and carried out the experiments and wrote the paper. CHuang and YH participated selleck chemicals in the experiments and discussion. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.”
“Background ZnO is attractive for its various applications in electrical and optical devices by employing excitonic effects since it possesses promising wide and direct bandgap (3.37 eV at room temperature) and much larger exciton binding energy (60 meV) [1, 2]. There has been

considerable research interest in ZnO due to many potential applications in short wavelength for optoelectronic devices operating in the blue and ultraviolet (UV) region such as light-emitting diodes (LED) and gas-sensing applications [3]. It is found that a proper substrate is crucial to achieve a high-quality ZnO thin film and nanostructure [4]. Many substrates such as silicon, sapphire, quartz, etc. have been used to fabricate ZnO films [5–7]. Among these, Si is the most popular substrate due to its low cost, high crystalline perfection, and high productivity in large-area wafer. However, the large mismatch GW3965 in vitro of lattice constants and thermal expansion coefficients between ZnO and Si will deteriorate the optical property of the ZnO films on Si substrates [8, 9]. The employment of buffer layers such as GaN [10], MgO [11],

and SiC [12] becomes a positive way to solve this problem. GaN is a perfect candidate because it has similar crystal structure as ZnO, and the lattice mismatch is 1.8 % on the c-plane; furthermore, the thermal expansion coefficients of ZnO are close to those of GaN. Recently, ZnO films have been grown on GaN template using QNZ molecular beam epitaxy, metal-organic chemical vapor deposition, magnetron 2-hydroxyphytanoyl-CoA lyase sputtering, pulsed laser deposition (PLD), etc. [13–15]. Jang et al. [16, 17] grew different ZnO nanostructures on GaN epitaxial layers via a hydrothermal method generating a variety of structures including rod-, sea urchin-, and flower-like structures. Studies on the growth of GaN-based and ZnMgO/MgO heterostructure materials have proved that column crystal growth is an effective way to relax part of the stress and improve the quality of the epitaxial layers [18–20]. That is, the formation of nanocolumnar microstructure allows the combination of materials with large lattice mismatch without generating dislocations, bringing on some novel low-dimensional physical phenomena.