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Updated: Dec 10, 2025
Evaluating Plasmonic Transport in Current-carrying Silver Nanowires
Published on: December 11, 2013
Optically Programmable Plateau-Rayleigh Instability for High-Resolution and Scalable Morphology Manipulation of
Gui-Shi Liu1, Mengyi He1, Ting Wang1
1Key Laboratory of Optoelectronic Information and Sensing Technologies of Guangdong Higher Education Institutes, Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, College of Science & Engineering, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China.
Abstract:
The ability to engineer microscale and nanoscale morphology upon metal nanowires (NWs) has been essential to achieve new electronic and photonic functions. Here, this study reports an optically programmable Plateau-Rayleigh instability (PRI) to demonstrate a facile, scalable, and high-resolution morphology engineering of silver NWs (AgNWs) at temperatures <150 °C within 10 min. This has been accomplished by conjugating a photosensitive diphenyliodonium nitrate with AgNWs to modulate surface-atom diffusion. The conjugation is UV-decomposable and able to form a cladding of molten salt-like compounds, so that the PRI of the AgNWs can be optically programmed and triggered at a much lower temperature than the melting point of AgNWs. This PRI self-assembly technique can yield both various novel nanostructures from single NW and large-area microelectrodes from the NW network on various substrates, such as a nanoscale dot-dash chain and the microelectrode down to 5 μm in line width that is the highest resolution ever fabricated for the AgNW-based electrode. Finally, the patterned AgNWs as flexible transparent electrodes were demonstrated for a wearable CdS NW photodetector. This study provides a new paradigm for engineering metal micro-/nanostructures, which holds great potential in fabrication of various sophisticated devices.
