In-fiber semiconductor filament arrays.
We report a novel physical phenomenon in which a cylindrical shell undergoing a scaling process evolves into an ordered array of filaments upon reaching a characteristic thickness. We observe that the tendency to breakup is related to the material viscosity in a manner reminiscent of capillary instability. However, unlike the classical breakup of a fluid cylinder into droplets, the structural evolution in our system occurs exclusively in the cross sectional plane while uniformity is maintained in the axial direction. We propose a fluid front instability mechanism to account for the observed phenomena. The fleeting evolution of fluid breakup from a thin film to a filament array is captured in the frozen state by a thermal drawing process which results in extended lengths of solid sub-100 nm filaments encapsulated within a polymer fiber. Hundreds of glassy semiconductor filament arrays are precisely oriented within a polymer fiber matrix making electrical connections trivial. This approach offers unique opportunities for fabrication of nanometer scale devices of unprecedented lengths allowing simplified access and connectivity.
Research Laboratory of Electronics, Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, USA.
D S
DS
Deng
N D
ND
Orf
A F
AF
Abouraddy
A M
AM
Stolyarov
J D
JD
Joannopoulos
H A
HA
Stone
Y
Y
Fink