Light patterned dielectrophoresis or optoelectronic tweezers (OET) has been proved to be an effective micromanipulation technology for cell separation, cell sorting and control of cell interactions. Apart from being useful for cell biology experiments, the capability of moving small objects accurately also makes OET an attractive technology for other micromanipulation applications. In particula...

The fabrication of a composite membrane of nanoporous gold nanowires and anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) is demonstrated by the electrodeposition of Au-Ag alloy nanowires into an AAO membrane, followed by selective etching of silver from the alloy nanowires. This composite membrane is advantageous for flow-through type catalytic reactions. The morphology evolution of the nanoporous gold nanowires a...

Here we investigate the feasibility of silver as seed-particle material to synthesize GaAs nanowires and show that both crystal phase and growth direction can be controlled by choice of substrate orientation. A (111)B substrate orientation can be used to form vertically aligned wurtzite GaAs nanowires and a (100) substrate orientation to form vertically aligned zinc blende GaAs nanowires. A 45-...

Silver (Ag) nanowires with chemically clean surfaces have been directly grown on semi-insulating gallium arsenide (GaAs) wafers through a simple solution/solid interfacial reaction (SSIR) between the GaAs wafers themselves and aqueous solutions of silver nitrate (AgNO(3)) at room temperature. The success in synthesis of Ag nanowires mainly benefits from the low concentration of surface electron...

We report the results of a computational, atomistic electrodynamics study of the effects of electromagnetic waves on the mechanical properties, and specifically the Young's modulus of silver nanowires. We find that the Young's modulus of the nanowires is strongly dependent on the optical excitation energy, with a peak enhancement occurring at the localized surface plasmon resonance frequency. W...

Manipulation and control of matter at the nanoand atomic level are crucial for the success of nano-scale sensors and actuators. The ability to control and synthesize multilayer composite structures using carbon nanotubes that will enable to build electronic devices within a nanotube is still in its infancy. In this paper, we present results on selective electrochemical deposition of metals and ...

Silver nanowires are promising components of flexible electronics such as interconnects and touch displays. Despite the expected cyclic loading in these applications, characterization of the cyclic mechanical behavior of chemically synthesized high-quality nanowires has not been reported. Here, we combine in situ TEM tensile tests and atomistic simulations to characterize the cyclic stress-stra...

The distributed plasticity of pentatwinned silver nanowires has been revealed in recent computational and experimental studies. However, the molecular dynamics (MD) simulations have not considered the imperfections seen in experiments, such as irregular surface undulations, the high aspect ratio of nanowires, and the stiffness of loading devices. In this work, we report the effect of such inher...

This article describes how the dimensions of nanowires affect the transmittance and sheet resistance of a random nanowire network. Silver nanowires with independently controlled lengths and diameters were synthesized with a gram-scale polyol synthesis by controlling the reaction temperature and time. Characterization of films composed of nanowires of different lengths but the same diameter enab...

Regular-shaped metal nanocrystals and their ensembles can serve as ideal substrates for studying surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS). We synthesized well-defined silver nanowires for a systematic study of SERS signal with respect to polarization and structural ordering. The observed dependence on polarization direction confirms prior theoretical predictions that large electromagnetic (EM) ...