Applied Physics Letters 2017-07-13

Elastocapillary bundling of high aspect-ratio metallic glass nanowires

Zhonglue Hu, Ceren Uzun, Ziye Dong, Wei Li, Ayrton A. Bernussi, Golden Kumar

Index: 10.1063/1.4993599

Full Text: HTML

Abstract

Collapsing and bundling of wet nanostructures can be a desirable or an unwanted phenomenon depending on the target application. We study the effect of the aspect-ratio and solvent surface tension on bundling of Pt-based metallic glass nanowires prepared by thermoplastic molding. The results show that the bundling can be quantitatively described by the competition between the Laplacian capillary force and the elastic restoring force. Supercritical CO2 drying can prevent bundling to form vertically aligned metallic glass nanowires with high aspect-ratios (>15). Optical measurements and simulations reveal that the diffuse reflectance of metallic glass nanowires strongly depends on their profile (vertical or bundled).