Highly oriented SiC porous nanowire (NW) arrays on Si substrate have been achieved via in situ carbonizing aligned Si NW arrays standing on Si substrate. The resultant SiC NW arrays inherit the diameter and length of the mother Si NW arrays. Field emission measurements show that these oriented SiC porous NW arrays are excellent field emitter with large field emission current denstity at very low electric field. The in situ conversion method reported here might be exploited to fabricate NW arrays of other materials containing silicon.
