Metal Catalyst for Low-Temperature Growth of Controlled Zinc Oxide Nanowires on Arbitrary Substrates

Abstract

Zinc oxide nanowires generated by hydrothermal method present superior physical and chemical characteristics. Quality control of the growth has been very challenging and controlled growth is only achievable under very limited conditions using homogeneous seed layers with high temperature processes. Here we show the controlled ZnO nanowire growth on various organic and inorganic materials without the requirement of a homogeneous seed layer and a high temperature process. We also report the discovery of an important role of the electronegativity in the nanowire growth on arbitrary substrates. Using heterogeneous metal oxide interlayers with low-temperature hydrothermal methods, we demonstrate well-controlled ZnO nanowire arrays and single nanowires on flat or curved surfaces. A metal catalyst and heterogeneous metal oxide interlayers are found to determine lattice-match with ZnO and to largely influence the controlled alignment. These findings will contribute to the development of novel nanodevices using controlled nanowires.

Low-temperature large-area fabrication of ZnO nanowires on flexible plastic substrates by solution-processible metal-seeded hydrothermal growth

“…8 shows the exemplary results of conformal ZNW growths on glass, PI, and PC substrates. The underlying mechanism on the Ag-mediated hydrothermal ZNW growth is attributed to the interactions between oxidized Ag surface and ZnO complexes in the solution [ 42 , 43 ]. Briefly, the ionized Ag surface generating on the native oxide ( i.e.…”

Synthesizing high aspect ratio Aluminum Oxide nanowires from highly-ordered anodic self-assembled templates

“…), which make them suitable for micro-electronic device applications . Although, synthesizing the Aluminum Oxide nanostructures in large volume for industrial applications, due to their expensive and time consuming production methods such as: chemical vapor deposition (CVD) techniques or electrophoretic based methods [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32], limited their application for opteoelectronic devices or water purification technologies. On the other hand, novel fabrication techniques such as electrochemical anodization methods have shown more accurate controllability over materials morphology and chemical composition of nanostructures in comparison to conventional production techniques as well as their easier scalability for industrial applications [33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52].…”

Growth of ZnO nanowires on multi-layered polymer structures fabricated by UV liquid transfer imprint lithography

“…Prior to the introduction of the hydrothermal synthesis process by Vayssieries [19,20], methods of growing ZnO nanowires were restricted to processes that employed rigid substrates like Si and glass under high vacuum and high temperature environments. [21][22][23][24][25].…”

“…[21][22][23][24][25]. In contrast, hydrothermal synthesis is conducted at atmospheric pressure and temperatures below 100 °C in an aqueous growth solution, and this has allowed ZnO nanowires to be grown on a variety of different substrates [20], such as Si wafers [26,27], PDMS [28], thermoplastic films [10,29], paper [30], and carbon fiber [31]. Hydrothermal synthesis can also potentially be used to integrate ZnO nanowires on polymer structures using advanced lithographic fabrication methods, such as microcontact printing (μCP) [14], nanoimprint lithography (NIL) [13,32,33], or liquid transfer imprint lithography (LTIL) [34][35][36][37].…”