Nanolithographic Manipulated Cutting of Aligned Metal Oxide Nanowires

摘要

Controlling the characteristics of nanowires in order to later construct nanoarchitecture and nanocomponents for nanodevice and nanosensor applications is essential. Metal oxide nanowires are aligned using the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) technique to uniaxially compress the nanowires. A surfactant monolayer of metal oxide nanowires is fabricated, and then compressed on an aqueous subphase. The compression yields an array of aligned nanowires, which is transferred to a planar substrate. Cutting areas of the array are defined by electron beam nanolithography. After an etching process, it is shown that the metal oxide nanowires have been successfully cut. With further refinement of this technique, the nanowires can be used to construct basic building blocks of nanodevices and nanosensors.