Confinement-guided shaping of semiconductor nanowires and nanoribbons: "writing with nanowires"

Alexander Pevzner, Yoni Engel, Roey Elnathan, Alexander Tsukernik, Zahava Barkay, Fernando Patolsky*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

66 Scopus citations

Abstract

To fully exploit their full potential, new semiconductor nanowire building blocks with ab initio controlled shapes are desired. However, and despite the great synthetic advances achieved, the ability to control nanowire's geometry has been significantly limited. Here, we demonstrate a simple confinement-guided nanowire growth method that enables to predesign not only the chemical and physical attributes of the synthesized nanowires but also allows a perfect and unlimited control over their geometry. Our method allows the synthesis of semiconductor nanowires in a wide variety of two-dimensional shapes such as any kinked (different turning angles), sinusoidal, linear, and spiral shapes, so that practically any desired geometry can be defined. The shape-controlled nanowires can be grown on almost any substrate such as silicon wafer, quartz and glass slides, and even on plastic substrates (e.g., Kapton HN).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)7-12
Number of pages6
JournalNano Letters
Volume12
Issue number1
DOIs
StatePublished - 11 Jan 2012

Keywords

  • Nanowires
  • assembly
  • germanium
  • nanomaterial
  • nanoribbons
  • semiconductor
  • shape control
  • silicon

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