Researchers have created a variety of small, three-dimensional structures by buckling strips of silicon and other materials.
Turning advanced two-dimensional materials into three-dimensional shapes has proved difficult. John Rogers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and his colleagues added hydroxyl groups at specific locations along the length of silicon ribbons as narrow as 800 nanometres and as thin as 100 nm. They also added these groups in specific patterns to an elastic, stretched substrate, and allowed the silicon strips to bond to the substrate.
When the substrate returned to its original shape, the silicon buckled to form a range of structures less than a millimetre wide (pictured), including helices, boxes and flowers. These could then be assembled into larger configurations.
The method uses a variety of materials, such as metals and polymers, and has the potential to make structures for a wide range of electronic devices, the authors say.
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Silicon buckles to form 3D shapes. Nature 517, 247 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/517247a
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/517247a
