Nano Today (2013) 8, 14

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/nanotoday

NEWS AND OPINIONS

Nanowire growth method plucked out of the air

Cordelia Sealy

Semiconductor nanowires could form the basis of a new generation of electronic devices, but producing them in industrial quantities has proved challenging. Now researchers from Lund University in Sweden think they may have plucked the answer out of the air. Lars Samuelson and his colleagues have developed an aerosol-based growth method, or aerotaxy, that can produce nanowires of the same size, with a high degree of crystallinity at a remarkable speed [M. Heurlin, et al., Nature 492 (2012), 90]. The revolutionary approach starts with catalytic Au nanoparticles suspended in an aerosol of precursor materials. The nanoparticles essentially take the role of the substrate for the growth of nanowires. When I rst suggested the idea of getting rid of the substrate, people said I was out of my mind. But when we tested the principle, the results were better than we could have dreamt of, says Samuelson. When heated in a tube furnace, the nanoparticles catalyze the growth of GaAs nanowires at a remarkable rate of around 1 m/s, 201000 times faster than traditional,

substrate-based techniques (Fig. 1). Varying the growth temperature, the gas velocity through the furnace, and the Au particle size allows sensitive and reproducible control of the nanowire shape and dimension in turn allowing the optical and electronic properties to be tuned. [This process] turns things upside down, says Samuelson. We have developed an extremely fast fabrication method for functional semiconductor materials and devices. [It is a] continuous fabrication, not limited by batch-processes as are most established semiconductor fabrication methods, like epitaxy. The researchers believe that the technique could be used more generally with other precursor materials to form a wide variety of nanowires. Samuelson told Nano Today that he and his team are currently working on a dual in-line chamber so that differently doped segments or heterostructures can be formed. The researchers also plan to add in situ characterization, so that the nanowires can be mapped as they grow.

Figure 1 A completely new method of manufacturing nanowires could make the process thousands of times quicker, allowing for cheaper semiconductors. Instead of starting from a Si wafer or other substrate, researchers have made it possible for the structures to grow from freely suspended Au nanoparticles in a owing gas. [Credit: Lund University, Sweden.]

2 The technique could have a signicant impact on the commercialization of nanowires, according to Charles M. Lieber of Harvard University. Given the great diversity of functional properties demonstrated previously by nanowire materials, the capability of this new aerotaxy to be applied to a broad class of nanowire materials offers great promise for commercial applications as the methodology could be easily used for continuous, large scale synthesis, he told Nano Today. It is very likely that this new approach could open up new synthetic directions to create more complex and functional nanowires not possible using traditional substrate-based synthesis. Brian A. Korgel of the University of Texas at Austin agrees that aerotaxy will serve as an inspiration for the

C. Sealy development of high throughput manufacturing for semiconductor nanowires. This is really important for achieving the manufacturing scale needed for many applications, such as photocatalysts for solar fuels applications, new kinds of polymer/nanowire composites and even fabrics or textiles made of semiconductor nanowires with new combinations of mechanical, optical and electrical properties, he says. Samuelson suggests the aerotaxy technique could be ready for commercialisation in as little as two to four years time, with a prototype ready for solar cells in two years time. E-mail address: cordelia.sealy@googlemail.com
1748-0132/$ see front matter http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.nantod.2012.12.007

Carbon nanotubes spin a new yarn on articial muscles

Cordelia Sealy

Articial muscles based on smart materials which change size or shape when stimulated could form the basis of a new generation of robotics or sensing and control functions. But so far these materials have tended to have low efciency, require an electrolyte or only provide a large amount of force with little movement or larger motions with less force. Now researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas, Nankai University in China, Hanyang University in South Korea, University of Wollongong in Australia, State University of Campinas and Universidade Estadual Paulista in Brazil, and the University of British Columbia in Canada have fabricated a new type of articial muscle the diameter of a human hair. The carbon nanotube (CNT) yarns infused with parafn wax deliver both great strength and speed of motion [M.D. Lima, et al., Science 338 (2012) 928]. These actuating materials, which convert a stimuli like light, electricity, heat or even a chemical trigger into a twisting or tensile motion, use the expansion of the parafn wax or other volume-changing guest material to drive the movement. When the parafn, which is stuck or conned to the nanosized pores in the multi-walled carbon nanotubes, is exposed to heat, voltage or a ash of light, it expands and drives a volume increase in the yarn that in turn contracts the yarn length. The combination of the volume increase with the length decrease is produced by the twisted, helical nature of the yarn, which is formed by twist-spinning the nanotubes together (Fig. 1). The strength of the articial muscles is remarkable: a two-end tethered, wax-lled yarn can lift 17,700 times its own weight for over a million cycles. The researchers also report a yarn able to lift 175,000 times its own weight in

30 ms equivalent to 85 times the peak output of the best mammalian skeletal muscles and 30 times greater the previously highest recorded CNT muscles. The articial muscles that weve developed can provide large, ultrafast contractions to lift weights that are 200 times heavier than possible for a natural muscle of the same size, says lead researcher Ray H. Baughman. Because of their simplicity and high performance, these yarn muscles could be used for such diverse applications as robots, catheters for minimally invasive surgery, micromotors, mixers for microuidic circuits, tunable optical systems, microvalves, positioners and even toys. Baughman believes that small actuators based on the hybrid CNT yarns, which are extraordinarily simple to make he says, could be commercialized in a few years, with

Figure 1 Articial muscles made from CNT yarns inltrated with parafn wax and twisted until coils form along their length. The diameter of this coiled yarn is about twice the width of a human hair. (Credit: Ray H. Baughman, University of Texas at Dallas.).