Abstract
The “purest” bottom-up technique, direct-growth relies on the spontaneous assembly of atoms and/or molecules that can occur under certain conditions in order to create nanostructures. By growing nanostructures directly in this manner a very large range of possibilities become available as described in the following sections. Often the greatest challenge becomes finding the best way to select from a multitude of options in order to harness self-assembly in a way this is suitable for the requirements of nanofabrication.
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- 1.
Perhaps the most opposite to direct-growth would be the direct-destruction of a material, and such top-down approaches based on nanoscale milling or grinding are also being developed for nanofabrication using various materials.
- 2.
See, e.g., G.J. Hutchings, M. Haruta, Appl. Catal. A 291, 2 (2005), and references therein.
- 3.
The truncated icosahedron shape is familiar as the traditional black and white soccer ball composed of hexagons and pentagons on its exterior surface.
- 4.
The terms fullerenes, buckyballs, etc. all originate from the similarity of small carbon nanostructures to the structural dome designs of Buckminster Fuller.
- 5.
See W. Krätschmer, L.D. Lamb, K. Fostiropoulos, D.R. Huffman, Nature 347, 354 (1990).
- 6.
The most important being the so-called quantum cascade laser.
- 7.
The shape of the well in this case results from a built-in electric field that attracts carriers to the planar junction interface.
- 8.
Real CNTs will always contain a certain amount of defects in their lattice structure (either on the cylindrical surface and/or ends). This applies in general to all crystalline materials in practice whether they are nanostructures or bulk crystals.
- 9.
S. Iijima, Nature 354, 56 (1991).
- 10.
CVD growth is also used to create 2D graphene layers with good crystallinity that can in in principle be processed using conventional planar techniques and patterned into various shapes.
- 11.
H. Omachi et al., Nat. Chem. 5, 572 (2013).
- 12.
Similar junctions can be formed between two different (diameter or chirality) CNTs, however control during growth in this case is in general more difficult.
- 13.
J. Turkevich, P.C. Stevenson and J. Hillier, Discuss. Faraday Soc. 11, 55 (1951).
- 14.
In general, superlattices refer to any periodic arrangement of structures in one, two, or all three spatial dimensions. For example, semiconductor quantum well superlattices in the form of 1D or linear arrays; the colloidal masks of Chap. 6 can also be considered superlattices or “colloidal crystals”.
- 15.
See, e.g., K. Byrappa, T. Adschiri, Prog. Cryst. Growth Charact. Mater. 53, 117 (2007), and references therein.
- 16.
Larger molecules based on so-called supramolecular chemistry is well-developed also and typically deals with the synthesis of structures consisting of several molecular subunits to form complex molecular nanostructures with widely varying chemical and physical properties.
- 17.
It is also possible to form well-ordered molecular thin films from the vapor phase inside a vacuum chamber; similar to the epitaxial growth of inorganic crystalline films.
- 18.
That is, molecules possessing both hydrophilic and hydrophobic groups.
- 19.
Other nanostructures can be incorporated into the bilayer from solution as well to create films with different electrical or optical functionalities, etc.
- 20.
See, e.g., N.C. Seeman, Nature 421, 427 (2003), and references therein.
- 21.
Recall the double-stranded helix DNA molecular structure consists of a sugar phosphate backbone and complementary base-pairs [adenine (A) and thymine (T); guanine (G) and cytosine (C)] that bind the two strands together in the hybridization process to create a molecule roughly 2 nm in diameter.
- 22.
The molecules or nanostructures are typically tagged or functionalized in order to attach to specific locations on the designed DNA pattern.
- 23.
This process could also work in reverse; e.g., a film of nanostructures is grown first and then patterned via photolithography.
- 24.
See, e.g., D. Nykypanchuk et al., Nature 451, 549 (2008).
- 25.
See, e.g., K.-y. Tomizaki, K. Usui, H. Mihara, ChemBioChem 6, 782 (2005), and references therein.
- 26.
Some vapor phase deposition approaches, particularly those employing ultra-high vacuum chambers for certain types of epitaxial growth, are an exception and tend to be slow and fairly expensive.
- 27.
Assuming there are no physical/practical limitations, the design and mixing of a million or more different distinct chemical components in a beaker quickly becomes unfeasible for large-scale manufacturing.
References
C.P. Poole Jr., F.J. Owens, Introduction to Nanotechnology (Wiley, New Jersey, 2003)
R. Saito, G. Dresselhaus, M. Dresselhaus, Physical Properties of Carbon Nanotubes (Imperial College Press, London, 1998)
L. Huang, Z. Jia, S. O’Brien, J. Mater. Chem. 17, 3863 (2007)
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Papadopoulos, C. (2016). Direct-Growth and Self-assembly. In: Nanofabrication. SpringerBriefs in Materials. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31742-7_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31742-7_7
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