Study of Ac Dielectrophoretic Process of SiC Nanowires: A Universal Method for Alignment of Semiconductor Nanowires

In this study, the dielectrophoretic processes of SiC nanowires suspended in three typical solvents, (highly purified water, ethanol and isopropanol) were systematically investigated. Optical microscope and SEM characterizations were used to observe the order of SiC nanowires on the surface of gold microchannels. The gold microchannels were induced by Ac dielectrophoresis of the corresponding dispersion solutions of SiC nanowires, with a concentration of 0.1 mg/mL. The study shows that the dielectrophoresis process is an effective way of synthesizing highly oriented SiC nanoarrays using isopropanol solution. The results also show that the arrangement of SiC nanowires on the interdigital electrode configuration not only depend on the kind of solvent used, but also on the applied frequency (1000 Hz~1 MHz) and voltage (1 V~20 V).