Abstract
The bottom-up assembly of nanoelectronic devices from molecular building blocks is a target of widespread interest. Herein we demonstrate an in situ seeded growth approach to produce a nanowire-based electrical device. This exploits the chemisorption of block terpolymer-based seed fibres with a thiophene-functionalised corona onto metal electrodes as the initial step. We then use these surface-bound seeds to initiate the growth of well-defined one-dimensional fibre-like micelles via the seeded growth method known as "Living crystallisation-driven self-assembly'' and demonstrate that they are capable of spanning an interelectrode gap. Finally, a chemical oxidation step was used to transform the nanofibres into nanowires to generate a two-terminal device. This seeded growth approach of growing well-defined circuit elements provides a useful new design tool for bottom-up device fabrication.
Highlights
The bottom-up fabrication of nanoelectronic devices was conceptualised decades ago[1,2] but remains as an important challenge of intense interest
Much less explored, approach is to extend the self-assembly stages to the components themselves and for these to be grown in situ. 10–13 This could, in principle, allow components to adapt to changes in device con guration, such as electrode spacing, number etc. and enable more complex architectures to be constructed from simple molecular building blocks
We demonstrate that block terpolymer seeds from Gaussian scission of micelles can be designed to chemisorb onto electrode surfaces and initiate the controlled interfacial growth of micelles of well-de ned length
Summary
The bottom-up fabrication of nanoelectronic devices was conceptualised decades ago[1,2] but remains as an important challenge of intense interest. Such a well-de ned size and morphology of the bre-like micelle is in marked contrast to the (electro)chemically grown polymer systems.[10,11,12] The AFM data reveal the living nature of the CDSA process[29] by showing clear evidence for the increase in the seed length.
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