Nanoassembly of nanostructures by cutting, bending and soldering of carbon nanotubes with electron beam.
We report that a series of in situ nanofabrication techniques of nanostructures, including cutting, bending and soldering of carbon nanotubes (CNTs), inside a field emission scanning electron microscope (FE-SEM) used for nanoassembly of nanostructures. The CNTs can be cut with electron beam assisted with oxygen gas. The cutting was developed for the bending of CNT, if some conditions of the cutting technique are changed. These include the increase of the acceleration voltage and/or setting the oxygen gas nozzle farther from the sample, and/or reducing the irradiation time. Using the proposed bending method angles larger than 90 degrees can be formed and the location of the kink can be set accurately. It is also shown that tungsten can be deposited on a substrate by the electron-beam-induced deposition, if the oxygen of the proposed cutting technique is replaced by W(CO)6. In this paper, these three nanofabrication methods were employed in the creation of a two dimensional (2D) nanostructure, the letters N and U, and a three dimensional (3D) nanostructure, the letter N. The 2D letters were constructed from 6 CNTs assembled on a substrate while the 3D letter N was bended from a single CNT and fixed to stand on a substrate. Based on the high performance of the proposed techniques, it is suggested that the cutting, bending, and soldering techniques inside SEM will become widely utilized in the fabrication and assembly of nanodevices and in the characterization of nanomaterials.
Liu
Pou
P
Department of Micro-Nano Systems Engineering, Nagoya University, Furo-cho, Chikusa-ku, Nagoya 464-8603, Japan.
Kantola
Kalle
K
Fukuda
Toshio
T
Arai
Fumihito
F