Aligned deposition of bottom-up grown nanowires by two-directional pressure-controlled contact printing.

Aligned large-scale deposition of nanowires grown in a bottom-up manner with high yield is a persisting challenge but required to assemble single-nanowire devices effectively. Contact printing is a powerful strategy in this regard but requires so far adequate adjustment of the tribological surface interactions between nanowires and target substrate, e.g.

Epitaxial Bottom-up Growth of Silicon Nanowires on Oxidized Silicon by Alloy-Catalyzed Gas-Phase Synthesis.

High-yield epitaxial bottom-up growth of silicon nanowires is still challenging but desirable for various applications such as antireflective coatings, solar cells, and high-aspect-ratio scanning probes. Hence, pristine single-crystalline silicon surfaces are, in principle, required as a growth substrate, but reoxidation occurring prior to nanowire growth obstructs epitaxial growth significantly. Here, we present an approach that relies on Al/Au alloy catalysts for gas-phase silicon nanowire synthesis, allowing intrinsically an in situ removal of a native silicon-oxide layer during the initial growth stages.