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A nanoscale combing technique for the large-scale assembly of highly aligned nanowires

Nature Nanotechnology volume 8, pages 329–335 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

The controlled assembly of nanowires is a key challenge in the development of a range of bottom-up devices1,2. Recent advances2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19 in the post-growth assembly of nanowires and carbon nanotubes have led to alignment ratios of 80–95% for a misalignment angle of ±5° (refs 5, 12, 13, 14) and allowed various multiwire devices to be fabricated6,10,11,12,13,19. However, these methods still create a significant number of crossing defects, which restricts the development of device arrays and circuits based on single nanowires/nanotubes. Here, we show that a nanocombing assembly technique, in which nanowires are anchored to defined areas of a surface and then drawn out over chemically distinct regions of the surface, can yield arrays with greater than 98.5% of the nanowires aligned to within ±1° of the combing direction. The arrays have a crossing defect density of ∼0.04 nanowires per µm and efficient end registration at the anchoring/combing interface. With this technique, arrays of single-nanowire devices are tiled over chips and shown to have reproducible electronic properties. We also show that nanocombing can be used for laterally deterministic assembly, to align ultralong (millimetre-scale) nanowires to within ±1° and to assemble suspended and crossed nanowire arrays.

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Figure 1: Schematics and demonstration of nanocombing.
Figure 2: Nanowire density control.
Figure 3: Nanowire device arrays.
Figure 4: Nanocombing applications.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank J. Ellenbogen, S. Das and J. Klemic for helpful discussion, and J. Huang for modification of the nanocombing assembly tool. C.M.L. acknowledges support of this work from a contract from the MITRE Corporation (awards 92007 and 92009) and a National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellow award (N00244-09-1-0078).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Jun Yao, Hao Yan & Charles M. Lieber

  2. School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard University, Cambridge, 02138, Massachusetts, USA

    Charles M. Lieber

Authors
  1. Jun Yao
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  2. Hao Yan
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  3. Charles M. Lieber
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Contributions

J.Y. and C.M.L. designed the experiments. J.Y. performed the experiments and data analysis. H.Y. helped in nanowire synthesis and device fabrication. J.Y. and C.M.L. co-wrote the manuscript. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Charles M. Lieber.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Yao, J., Yan, H. & Lieber, C. A nanoscale combing technique for the large-scale assembly of highly aligned nanowires. Nature Nanotech 8, 329–335 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2013.55

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