Well-ordered Semiconductor Wire-Arrays Driven by in-Fibre Capillary Layer Breakup

Keywords:
wire, fibre, semiconductor, capillary instability

Abstract:
One-dimensional structures with nanometre scale have been demonstrated with substantial progresses for device applications in electronics, photonics, photovoltaics and biology. The fabrication for the well-ordered extended semiconductor wires is highly desirable for the alignment and assembly. Here by relying on optical-fibre drawing technique, we report the semiconductor (Se and As2Se3) wire-arrays embedded in the fibre at the reduced-thickness layer breakup. A finger-instability mechanism is proposed to explain the layer breakup and robust filaments during the thermal-drawing process, and theory calculations and experiment agree. Furthermore, filaments are extracted from the fibre by dissolving the polymer. This may offer new approach to produce wires with the high-throughput and low-cost capacity.

Nanotech 2008 Conference Program Abstract