Abstract
We present a high-throughput and scalable technique for the production of metal nanowires embedded in glass fibres by taking advantage of thin film properties and patterning techniques commonly used in planar microfabrication. This hybrid process enables the fabrication of single nanowires and nanowire arrays encased in a preform material within a single fibre draw, providing an alternative to costly and time-consuming iterative fibre drawing. This method allows the combination of materials with different thermal properties to create functional optoelectronic nanostructures. As a proof of principle of the potential of this technique, centimetre long gold nanowires (bulk Tm = 1064 °C) embedded in silicate glass fibres (Tg = 567 °C) were drawn in a single step with high aspect ratios (>104); such nanowires can be released from the glass matrix and show relatively high electrical conductivity. Overall, this fabrication method could enable mass manufacturing of metallic nanowires for plasmonics and nonlinear optics applications, as well as the integration of functional multimaterial structures for completely fiberised optoelectronic devices.
Highlights
Optical fibre technology has revolutionized many aspects of modern life
We demonstrate a flexible method, called lithography assisted fibre drawing (LAFD), for producing functional nanowires and nanowire arrays enclosed in a glass fibre with a single fibre draw
LAFD relies on planar lithography to incorporate heterogeneous thin films into the preform, with pre-patterned features that can be scaled down to nanometres in a single fibre draw
Summary
We have introduced a fibre drawing nanomanufacturing technique, called lithography-assisted fibre drawing (LAFD), for the production of ultra-long nanowires in glass claddings. Besides incorporation of metals as demonstrated here, glasses and semiconductors, whether amorphous or crystalline in phase, could potentially be incorporated with complex patterns within glass matrices; multimaterial nanoscale cores, such as heterogeneous core-shell stacks, could be produced by multiple sequential deposition steps; complex architectures, such as two-dimensional nanowire arrays with arbitrary arrangement, could be achieved by multiple splicing of the preform. This paves the way to the realization of nanowire heterojunctions and a variety of multimaterial based fiberised devices. Best cleaving was achieved using focused ion beam milling at low ion currents to prevent melting of the core
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