A nanowire is a nanostructure in the form of a wire with the diameter of the order of nanometres (10−9 m). More generally, nanowires can be defined as structures that have a thickness or diameter constrained to tens of nanometers or less and an unconstrained length. At these scales, quantum mechanical effects play an important role—which coined the term "quantum wires".
Many different types of nanowires exist, including superconducting (e.g. YBCO), metallic (e.g. Ni, Pt, Au, Ag), semiconducting (e.g. silicon nanowires (SiNWs), III-V compounds) and insulating (e.g. SiO2, TiO2). Molecular nanowires are composed of repeating molecular units either organic (e.g. DNA) or inorganic (e.g. Mo6S9−xIx). Because of their small size, nanowires are synthesized using various nanofabrication methods.
The physical properties (e.g. conductance, mechanical strength) of nanowires can differ greatly from the corresponding bulk material, which makes them interesting for electronic, mechanical and optical applications.
Characteristics
Typical nanowires exhibit aspect ratios (length-to-width ratio) of 1000 or more. As such they are often referred to as one-dimensional (1-D) materials. Nanowires have many interesting properties that are not seen in bulk or 3-D (three-dimensional) materials. This is because electrons in nanowires are quantum confined laterally and thus occupy energy levels that are different from the traditional continuum of energy levels or bands found in bulk materials.
A consequence of this quantum confinement in nanowires is that they exhibit discrete values of the electrical conductance. Such discrete values arise from a quantum mechanical constraint on the number electronic transport channels at the nanometer scale, and they are often approximately equal to integer multiples of the quantum of conductance:
This conductance is twice the reciprocal of the resistance unit called the von Klitzing constant, defined as and named for Klaus von Klitzing, the discoverer of the integer quantum Hall effect.
Examples of nanowires include inorganic molecular nanowires (Mo6S9−xIx, Li2Mo6Se6), which can have a diameter of 0.9 nm and be hundreds of micrometers long. Other important examples are based on semiconductors such as InP, Si, GaN, etc., dielectrics (e.g. SiO2,TiO2), or metals (e.g. Ni, Pt).
There are many applications where nanowires may become important in electronic, opto-electronic and nanoelectromechanical devices, as additives in advanced composites, for metallic interconnects in nanoscale quantum devices, as field-emitters and as leads for biomolecular nanosensors.
Synthesis
There are two basic approaches to synthesizing nanowires: top-down and bottom-up. A top-down approach reduces a large piece of material to small pieces, by various means such as lithography, milling or thermal oxidation. A bottom-up approach synthesizes the nanowire by combining constituent adatoms. Most synthesis techniques use a bottom-up approach. Initial synthesis via either method may often be followed by a nanowire thermal treatment step, often involving a form of self-limiting oxidation, to fine tune the size and aspect ratio of the structures. After the bottom-up synthesis, nanowires can be integrated using pick-and-place techniques.
Nanowire production uses several common laboratory techniques, including suspension, electrochemical deposition, vapor deposition, and VLS growth. Ion track technology enables growing homogeneous and segmented nanowires down to 8 nm diameter. As nanowire oxidation rate is controlled by diameter, thermal oxidation steps are often applied to tune their morphology.
Suspension A suspended nanowire is a wire produced in a high-vacuum chamber held at the longitudinal extremities. Suspended nanowires can be produced by: The chemical etching of a larger wire The bombardment of a larger wire, typically with highly energetic ions Indenting the tip of a STM in the surface of a metal near its melting point, and then retracting it
VLS growth A common technique for creating a nanowire is vapor–liquid–solid method (VLS), which was first reported by Wagner and Ellis in 1964 for silicon whiskers with diameters ranging from hundreds of nm to hundreds of μm. This process can produce high-quality crystalline nanowires of many semiconductor materials, for example, VLS–grown single crystalline silicon nanowires (SiNWs) with smooth surfaces could have excellent properties, such as ultra-large elasticity. This method uses a source material from either laser ablated particles or a feed gas such as silane.
VLS synthesis requires a catalyst. For nanowires, the best catalysts are liquid metal (such as gold) nanoclusters, which can either be self-assembled from a thin film by dewetting, or purchased in colloidal form and deposited on a substrate.
The source enters these nanoclusters and begins to saturate them. On reaching supersaturation, the source solidifies and grows outward from the nanocluster. Simply turning off the source can adjust the final length of the nanowire. Switching sources while still in the growth phase can create compound nanowires with super-lattices of alternating materials. For example, a method termed ENGRAVE (Encoded Nanowire GRowth and Appearance through VLS and Etching) developed by the Cahoon Lab at UNC-Chapel Hill allows for nanometer-scale morphological control via rapid in situ dopant modulation.
A single-step vapour phase reaction at elevated temperature synthesises inorganic nanowires such as Mo6S9−xIx. From another point of view, such nanowires are cluster polymers.
Similar to VLS synthesis, VSS (vapor-solid-solid) synthesis of nanowires (NWs) proceeds through thermolytic decomposition of a silicon precursor (typically phenylsilane). Unlike VLS, the catalytic seed remains in solid state when subjected to high temperature annealing of the substrate. This such type of synthesis is widely used to synthesise metal silicide/germanide nanowires through VSS alloying between a copper substrate and a silicon/germanium precursor.
Solution-phase synthesis Solution-phase synthesis refers to techniques that grow nanowires in solution. They can produce nanowires of many types of materials. Solution-phase synthesis has the advantage that it can produce very large quantities, compared to other methods. In one technique, the polyol synthesis, ethylene glycol is both solvent and reducing agent. This technique is particularly versatile at producing nanowires of gold, lead, platinum, and silver.
The supercritical fluid-liquid-solid growth method can be used to synthesize semiconductor nanowires, e.g., Si and Ge. By using metal nanocrystals as seeds, Si and Ge organometallic precursors are fed into a reactor filled with a supercritical organic solvent, such as toluene. Thermolysis results in degradation of the precursor, allowing release of Si or Ge, and dissolution into the metal nanocrystals. As more of the semiconductor solute is added from the supercritical phase (due to a concentration gradient), a solid crystallite precipitates, and a nanowire grows uniaxially from the nanocrystal seed.
Liquid Bridge Induced Self-assembly Protein nanowires in spider silk have been formed by rolling a droplet of spider silk solution over a superhydrophobic pillar structure.
Non-catalytic growth
The vast majority of nanowire-formation mechanisms are explained through the use of catalytic nanoparticles, which drive the nanowire growth and are either added intentionally or generated during the growth. However, nanowires can be also grown without the help of catalysts, which gives an advantage of pure nanowires and minimizes the number of technological steps. The mechanisms for catalyst-free growth of nanowires (or whiskers) were known from 1950s.
The simplest methods to obtain metal oxide nanowires use ordinary heating of the metals, e.g. metal wire heated with battery, by Joule heating in air can be easily done at home. Spontaneous nanowire formation by non-catalytic methods were explained by the dislocation present in specific directions or the growth anisotropy of various crystal faces. Nanowires can grow by screw dislocations or twin boundaries were demonstrated. The picture on the right shows a single atomic layer growth on the tip of CuO nanowire, observed by in situ TEM microscopy during the non-catalytic synthesis of nanowire.
Atomic-scale nanowires can also form completely self-organised without need for defects. For example, rare-earth silicide (RESi2) nanowires of few nm width and height and several 100 nm length form on silicon(001) substrates which are covered with a sub-monolayer of a rare earth metal and subsequently annealed. The lateral dimensions of the nanowires confine the electrons in such a way that the system resembles a (quasi-)one-dimensional metal. Metallic RESi2 nanowires form on silicon(hhk) as well. This system permits tuning the dimensionality between two-dimensional and one-dimensional by the coverage and the tilt angle of the substrate.
DNA-templated metallic nanowire synthesis
An emerging field is to use DNA strands as scaffolds for metallic nanowire synthesis. This method is investigated both for the synthesis of metallic nanowires in electronic components and for biosensing applications, in which they allow the transduction of a DNA strand into a metallic nanowire that can be electrically detected. Typically, ssDNA strands are stretched, whereafter they are decorated with metallic nanoparticles that have been functionalised with short complementary ssDNA strands.
Crack-Defined Shadow Mask Lithography
Optical lithography is a simple method to produce nanowires . In this approach, optical lithography is used to generate nanogaps using controlled crack formation. These nanogaps are then used as shadow mask for generating individual nanowires with precise lengths and widths. This technique allows to produce individual nanowires below 20 nm in width in a scalable way out of several metallic and metal oxide materials.
Physics
Conductivity
Several physical reasons predict that the conductivity of a nanowire will be much less than that of the corresponding bulk material. First, there is scattering from the wire boundaries, whose effect will be very significant whenever the wire width is below the free electron mean free path of the bulk material. In copper, for example, the mean free path is 40 nm. Copper nanowires less than 40 nm wide will shorten the mean free path to the wire width. Silver nanowires have very different electrical and thermal conductivity from bulk silver.
Nanowires also show other peculiar electrical properties due to their size. Unlike single wall carbon nanotubes, whose motion of electrons can fall under the regime of ballistic transport (meaning the electrons can travel freely from one electrode to the other), nanowire conductivity is strongly influenced by edge effects. The edge effects come from atoms that lay at the nanowire surface and are not fully bonded to neighboring atoms like the atoms within the bulk of the nanowire. The unbonded atoms are often a source of defects within the nanowire, and may cause the nanowire to conduct electricity more poorly than the bulk material. As a nanowire shrinks in size, the surface atoms become more numerous compared to the atoms within the nanowire, and edge effects become more important.