Large area nanograting based nanowires production technology for high productivity and its applications

Abstract

Nanowires have high potential to be applied to very wide range of science and engineering fields. So far, various fabrication methods for generating nanowires based on a top-down and bottom-up approaches. However, existing nanowires fabrication technologies show some problems, such as low productivity, material dependency, lack of dimension-controllability and so on. These technological hurdles make the existing nanowires fabrication method to be used in industrial and commercial applications. In this research, a novel approach for nanowires production based on a large-area, high-density nanograting template is proposed and demonstrated. A large-area nanograting pattern as a master template is developed through a novel repetitive pattern scaling technology. The fabricated master template was transferred to a plastic substrate through a high-resolution nanoimprinting lithography method reproducibly, as a disposable template. By using a conventional physical vapor deposition and wet etching process, both highly ordered nanowire arrays and randomly distributed nanowire network was successfully produced with a wide range of materials. By applying the proposed approach, industry-compatible high-productivity nanowires fabrication was successfully achieved. The proposed technology provides a way to nanowires production, with high material versatility, high regularity, high productivity and efficiency, which have not be achieved by conventional bottom-up based approaches. As practical applications of the proposed nanowire mass-production technology, a high-throughput palladium nanowire based hydrogen sensor and large-area wire grid polarizer for visible light polarizing were proposed and successfully demonstrated.