The Influence of the Asymmetric Metal Electrodes on the Self-assembly of Single-walled Carbon Nanotubes by AC Dielectrophoresis

Abstract

There are two procedures in the single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) DEP (dielectrophoresis) assembly process, including the DEP and suspension removal. This paper mainly pays attention to the effects of the suspension removal procedure on the assembly efficiency. We found that the interaction energy between the SWCNTs and electrode metal materials plays a major role in preventing the arriving SWCNTs from getting off the electrodes when the suspension is blown-off, which will impact the DEP assembly yield of SWCNTs further. Three kinds of metal materials having various interaction energy with SWCNTs with the order of Ti>Hf>Al were chosen as the electrode materials and then the SWCNTs DEP assembly experiments were carried out. Our results show that the assembly yields exhibit the accordant order with that of the interaction energy of Ti>Hf>Al, which demonstrates our deduction.