Template Assisted Electrochemical Deposition on Substrates, Tapes and Wires for Nanotechnology Applications

Anodic aluminum oxide-template-assisted electrochemical deposition (AAO-ED) is a popular technique to fabricate multi composition nanowires (NW) using self-supported AAO membranes. AAO-ED in conjunction with other techniques allows for the fabrication of complex, multi-compositional, core-shell NW architectures which possess physical properties, such as giant magnetoresistance, photonics, thermoelectric, and plasmonics. However, self-supported AAO templates have one main limitation, when the AAO template is removed it leaves a disordered NW distribution. In this work, we introduce a variation of the AAO-ED technique that allows for the growth of multi-compositional NWs on almost any surface and preliminary results show that unlike lithographic techniques, the NWs can even be synthesized on 3D surfaces. We applied this method to synthesize Ni and segmented Ni/Au NWs on Si substrates, flexible Cu tape, and thin Cu wires. This demonstrates that the proposed method can be applied to manufacture complex devices for nanotechnology applications.