In this work, the growth of undoped InP nanowires on silicon(111) using gold as the metal seed particle was undertaken by chemical beam epitaxy. Prior to the growth process an ordered array of gold nano dots is integrated on the surface of a silicon substrate using self-assembled (hexagonal compact array) polystyrene nanospheres as the Au evaporation template. The size of the gold nanoclots ranged from 20 to 150 nm. The InP nanowires were characterized using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and photoluminescence (PL). The InP nanowires were found to grow tilted in the < 100 > direction and exhibited slightly broadened low-temperature photoluminescence emissions. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.