Atomic level nanowires can now be produced at scale

Tokyo, Japan – Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have found a way to make self-assembled nanowires of moving metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from a parallel arrangement of atomic thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way for industrial use in next-generation industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices.

Electronics is all about making things smaller. Smaller features of a chip, for example, mean more computing power in the same amount of space and better efficiency, necessary to feed the increasingly heavy-duty applications of a chip. a modern IT structure powered by hardware and artificial intelligence. And as machines become smaller, the same applications are being made of the complex wiring that connects everything together. The ultimate goal is a string that is only an atom or two thick. Nanowires thus began to reduce physics completely differently as the electrons that pass through it behave more and more as if they were living in a one-dimensional world, not a 3D world.

In fact, scientists already have materials of carbon nanotubes and transition metal chalcogenides (TMCs), a combination of transition metals and group 16 elements that are capable of self-assembling into nanowires at the atomic level. The trouble is making them long enough, and of scale. A way to produce nanowires would be a game changer.

Now, a team led by Dr. Hong En Lim and Professional Professor Yasumitsu Miyata from Tokyo Metropolitan University devised a way to make long wires of moving metal telluride nanowires at blades never seen before. Using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), they found that they could collect TMC nanowires in different configurations depending on the surface or substrate that they use as a template. Examples are shown in Figure 2; in (a), nanowires grown on a silicon / silica substrate form a random network of bundles; in (b), the wires accumulate in a fixed direction on a sapphire substrate, following the structure of the underlying sapphire crystal. By simply changing where they are grown, the team now has access to centimeter-sized wafers that are covered in the desired configuration, including monolayers, bilayers and networks of folders, all with different applications. They also found that the structure of the wires themselves was highly crystalline and ordered, and that their properties, including good conductivity and 1D-like behavior, matched those found. in theoretical prediction.

Getting a lot of long, highly crystalline nanowires is sure to help physics characterize and study these alien structures in more depth. Importantly, it is an exciting step towards real-world applications of atomic thin wires, in transparent and flexible electronics, ultra-efficient devices and energy harvesting applications.

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1. Lim, HE; Nakanishi, Y .; Liu, Z .; Pu, J .; Maruyama, M .; Endo, T .; Ando, ​​C .; Shimizu, H .; Yanagi, K .; Okada, S .; Takenobu, T .; Fàs Miyata, Y. Wafer-Scale of Single-Measurement-Metal Telluride Nanowires. Nano Lett. [Online early access]. DOI: 10.1021 / acs.nanolett.0c03456. Published online: December 13, 2020. https: //pubs.acs.org /doi /10.1021 /acs.nanolett.0c03456 (available on December 13, 2020).

This work was supported by JST CREST Grants (JPMJCR16F3, JPMJCR17I5), Japan Society for the Advancement of Science (JSPS) KAKENHI Grants in Aid for Scientific Research (B) (JP18H01832, JP19H02543, JP20H02572, JP20H02573 , JP19K15393), Scientific Research on Innovative Areas (JP20H05189, JP26102012), Specially Inspired Research (JP25000003), Challenge Research (Research) (19K22127), and Scientific Research (A) (JP17H01069), and Foundation Grants Murata Science (2019, H31-068) and Keirin Japan Autorace Foundation (2020M-121). This work was carried out in part at the AIST Nanoprocessing Facility with the support of the “Nanotechnology Platform Program” of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), Japan. Donation Number JPMXP09F19008709 and 20009034.