A simple yet highly reproducible method to fabricate metallic electrodes with nanometer separation is presented. The fabrication is achieved by passing a large electrical current through a gold nanowire defined by electron-beam lithography and shadow evaporation. The current flow causes the electromigration of gold atoms and the eventual breakage of the nanowire. The breaking process yields two...

We show that a nanoparticle can serve as an efficient antenna for coupling of visible light into propagating plasmons of an Ag nanowire. For long wires, the coupling is maximal for incident light polarized perpendicular to the nanowire. For sub-10-mum nanowires, the polarization corresponding to maximum emission from the ends of the nanowire was found to be strongly dependent on the nanowire ge...

A new technique utilising electrochemical deposition with the assistance of porous alumina membranes as the fabrication template is developed to directly grow metallic nanowires on different substrates. To emphasise the nanowire application in boiling enhancement, Cu nanowire (CuNW) has been successfully fabricated on Si, Au and Cu substrates with improved thermal properties and mechanical reli...

Metallic contamination was key to the discovery of semiconductor nanowires, but today it stands in the way of their adoption by the semiconductor industry. This is because many of the metallic catalysts required for nanowire growth are not compatible with standard CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) fabrication processes. Nanowire synthesis with those metals that are CMOS compatible,...

Metallic nanowires show unique physical properties owing to their one-dimensional nature. Many of these unique properties are intimately related to electron-electron interactions, which have a much more prominent role in one dimension than in two or three dimensions. Here we report the direct visualization of quantum size effects responsible for preferred lengths of self-assembled metallic irid...

Chiral surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) can be generated by linearly polarized light incident at the end of a nanowire, exciting a coherent superposition of three specific nanowire waveguide modes. Images of chiral SPPs on individual nanowires obtained from quantum dot fluorescence excited by the SPP evanescent field reveal the chirality predicted in our theoretical model. The handedness and s...

It is generally believed that when a single metallic nanowire is sufficiently small, it scatters like a point electric dipole. We show theoretically when a metallic nanowire is placed inside specially designed beams, the magnetic dipole contribution along with the electric dipole resonance can lead to unidirectional scattering in the far field, fulfilling Kerker's condition. Remarkably, this fa...

We have modeled the field and space charge distributions in back-gate and top-gate nanowire field effect transistors by solving the three-dimensional Poisson's equation numerically. It is found that the geometry of the gate oxide, the semiconductivity of the nanowire, and the finite length of the device profoundly affect both the total amount and the spatial distribution of induced charges in t...

Patterning of nanowires in a controllable, tunable manner is important for the fabrication of functional nanodevices. Here we present a simple approach for tunable nanowire patterning using standing surface acoustic waves (SSAW). This technique allows for the construction of large-scale nanowire arrays with well-controlled patterning geometry and spacing within 5 s. In this approach, SSAWs were...

Motivated by the analysis of electrochemical growth of metallic nanowires from solution, we studied ion fluxes near nanoelectrodes in a binary symmetric electrolyte on the basis of the modified Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations in the strongly nonlinear region at large applied ac voltage. For an approximate calculation of the electric field near the nanowire tip, concentric spherical blocking ele...