**1.4 Solution-liquid-solid (SLS)**

Solution-liquid-solid (SLS) phases are involved in the nanowire growth that is in fact an analogy to the conventional whisker growth via vapor-liquid-solid (VLS) mechanism. The difference is that the vapor phase involved in the VLS growth is now substituted by a solution phase in the SLS mechanism. In turns out, however, the nanowires prepared by the SLS mechanism have a varying diameter ranging from 10 to 150 nm, which is not uniform [29, 30].
