Micron Level Placement of Nanowires via Real

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Micron Level Placement of Nanowires via Real Time Observation Under Optical Microscope on a Desired Nanochannel for... Conference Paper · November 2016 DOI: 10.1115/IMECE2016-67969

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Proceedings of the International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition IMECE November 13, 2016, Phoenix, Arizona, USA

ASME2016-67969 MICRON LEVEL PLACEMENT OF NANOWIRES VIA REAL TIME OBSERVATION UNDER OPTICAL MICROSCOPE ON A DESIRED NANOCHANNEL FOR NANOSENSORS APPLICATION Mohammad Beheshti Mechanical Engineering Department, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, United States, LA 70803 [email protected]

Junseo Choi Mechanical Engineering Department, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, United States, LA 70803 [email protected]

Sunggook Park Mechanical Engineering Department, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, United States, LA 70803 [email protected]

X. Geng Chemical Engineering Department, Northeastern University, Boston, United States, MA 02115 [email protected]

ABSTRACT Alignment and placement of a single nanowire is a crucial task to assemble lab-on-a-chip devices. Nanowires placement techniques have been mostly performed by pick and place techniques or flow control techniques. These techniques require expensive control systems and they cannot be performed in the ambient conditions. This paper introduces a vision-based inexpensive approach for the alignment and placement of individual metal nanowires on a target nanochannel. Through visual observation of the optical microscope, the method aligned the nanowire perpendicular to the nanochannel. The reproducibility of the procedures was experimentally evaluated. INTRODUCTION In the recent years the nanowires were widely used as nanosensors to transfer the biological information into the electrical signals (Chen, Li et al. 2011, Beheshti, Faichney et al. 2015, Beheshti 2016). A nanowire is a small bar structure with the diameter of some nanometers which reveals special electronic properties as a biosensor. The application of pregrown nanowires in porous templates is preferred because of their high quality and low cost. However, the pre-grown nanowires agglomerate and take random positions and orientations after dissolution of their template (Long, Yu et al. 2012). Although some efforts were done to reduce the

Elizabeth Podlaha-Murphy Chemical Engineering Department, Northeastern University, Boston, United States, MA 02115 [email protected]

agglomeration and align (assemble) the nanowires (Beheshti, Park et al. 2015), the great challenge has been to place the single nanowires on the desired location with the accuracy of less than a micrometer. Several techniques were used for the manipulation of nanowires in submicrometer scale. The fallacies of these techniques becomes more obvious when they are used in the presence of large adhesion forces (Xie and Régnier 2011, Ansari 2014). These techniques are divided into two main categories: 1. Pick-and-place techniques 2. Flow control techniques. The first group of placement techniques used the Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) cantilever (Gianola, Sedlmayr et al. 2011, Xie, Lambert et al. 2011, Xie and Régnier 2011, Xie and Régnier 2012) or the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) probe (Lu, Huang et al. 2010, Bartenwerfer and Fatikow 2011) to grip and place the nanowire on the desired location. These techniques mostly perform the placement process inside the Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM). In the AFM system, two cantilevers directed by feedback controllers gripped the nanowire collaboratively and manipulated the nanowire in the three dimensions (Xie, Lambert et al. 2011). In the STM system, the adhesive bond between the end effector and the nanowire was used to pick the nanowire (Bartenwerfer and Fatikow 2011).

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The second group of placement techniques used the electroosmotic (Ropp, Probst et al. 2010, Probst, Cummins et al. 2012, Mathai, Carmichael et al. 2013) or electrophoretic (Yu, Yi et al. 2014) flow to control the motion of the nanowires in a two dimensional plane. In both methods, external electrodes caused pulling or pushing a layer of surface ions and the movement of the nanowires’ surrounding fluid. Thus, this movement resulted the movement of the nanowire by viscous drag. The location and the direction of the nanowire was measured and sent to the feedback control to correct the current position of the nanowire (Ropp, Probst et al. 2010, Mahmoudi, Beheshti et al. 2013). Although using the pick-and-place and flow control techniques have some advantages, they suffer from various problems: 1. The pick-and-place techniques require the AFM or STM platform for their processes and they mostly use SEM chamber and separate controllers to operate the placement. This makes the whole process very expensive. 2. The force of the cantilever or probe in pick-and-place techniques is not enough to overcome the adhesion force between the substrate and the nanowire in some cases. This problem is more important especially if they are performed inside ambient conditions. 3. The flow control techniques require an aqueous environment to do the placement process. Although the placement is successful inside the fluid, the position and direction of the nanowire may change after transferring the nanowire to a dried surface. Here we introduced a new low cost technique for the alignment, placement and transfer of the metallic nanowires on a nanochannel structure. In this method, the nano-features on two substrates were directly aligned using an optical microscope stage and a piezoelectric positioner. The features are continuously observed using the microscope. The alignment has the minimum accuracy of 10nm and this process can be performed in a dry ambient. EXPERIMENT The goal of the experiments was to align a single nanowire on a substrate perpendicular to a nanochannel on a different polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA) substrate. The main task to achieve this goal was to provide the potential of looking at the features of the two separate substrates by an optical microscope and to move the substrates separately and put the features on each other (nanowire alignment). This required a microscope, a micro-positioner with the proper controller, a holder to connect the top substrate to the microscope stage and the nanochannel and nanowire substrates. In this part we introduce the setup of the placement system. Then we move on to alignment process. Finally, we present the alignment results. Microscope: A Nikon microscope and a 40X lens with 10mm focal distance were used for the placement setup. We slightly modified the microscope moving and sitting stages to locate the positioner on the sitting stage.

Positioner: MX 35 miniature XYZ Positioners with piezo electric inertial drive was used as the micro-positioner (www.mechonics.de 2014). The travel distance of the positioner was 10mm in three dimensions and a CF30 controller was used for the positioner to provide the minimum travel resolution of 10nm. A rotary stage was attached to the top of the moving part of the positioner to add the rotating degree of freedom to the substrate on the positioner. Holder: Two different holders were used to hold the top substrate on the microscope stage: a simplified holder and a vacuum holder. The simple holder was a 76mm×76mm Teflon sheet that was machined to have a rectangular through hole of 25mm×50mm. The vacuum holder was also a 76mm×76mm Teflon sheet that was machined to have a square through hole of 10mm×10mm and air grooves for the vacuum. Nanochannel Substrate: The nanochannel structure was fabricated by Focused Ion Beam (FIB) on a silicon substrate. The structure on the silicon was copied to a polyurethaneacrylate (PUA) stamp by UV imprint lithography. Then the PUA stamp was imprinted thermally into a PMMA substrate. Nanowire Substrate: Electrodeposited NiFeCo nanowires were fabricated by growing them in a porous alumina template having holes with the diameter of 0.5 µm. Details on the electrodeposition process can be found in previous works (Reisner, Pedersen et al. 2012). The nanowires were prepared and deposited on a blank silicon or a poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA) substrates by using electromagnetic alignment. Nanowire alignment with vacuum holder: We Aligned the nanowire on a silicon substrate perpendicular to the nanochannel on a PMMA substrate. After that, the aligned nanowire was ready to be transferred to the PMMA substrate of the nanochannel. Figure 1 showed the schematics of the placement setup we used for this method.

Figure 1. Nanowires alignment setup schematics A vacuum holder was used to hold the top substrate over the microscope moving stage in xyz direction. Thus, the top substrate was held by the bottom surface of the vacuum holder while the vacuum was on. This made it possible for the top substrate to move in the x, y and z directions by the movement

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of the microscope xyz moving stage. On the other side, the bottom substrate moved by the positioner moving part in the xyz directions. The positioner was attached to the microscope stage that did not move in the x and y directions; however, it moved only in the z direction. Figure 2 showed the process steps for the alignment and transfer of the nanowire in this method. These steps were as follows: 1. Locate the nanowire silicon substrate on the positioner moving part. 2. Turn on the vacuum, attach the nanochannel PMMA substrate to the vacuum holder and locate the holder on the glass stands on the microscope xyz moving stage. 3. Align the bottom nanowire on silicon substrate perpendicular to the top nanochannel on PMMA substrate by zoom on the nanowire and nanochannel (the zooming was achieved by changing the vertical position of the microscope both stages in z direction). 4. Attach the top and bottom substrates by elevating the positioner. 5. Turnoff the vacuum holder and detach the two substrates from the vacuum holder by descending the positioner moving stage. 6. Carry the aligned substrates to the NIL and transfer the nanowire by thermal imprint to the nanochannel substrate.

Figure 3. Nanowire alignment results Our experiments verified that optical method is more efficient in the manipulation of nanoobjects to polymers substrates than the microgrippers and nanoprobes and it can be performed in ambient conditions. The requirements of preventing the contaminants from diffusing to the surface of the target substrate and the limitation of repeating the process on the same substrate are the disadvantages of this method. CONCLUSION An alignment system with the ability to place a target single nanowire on a desired location was developed. The system chosen a nanowire from the drop of separated pre-grown nanowires, aligned the nanowire on the nanochannel device and prepared the nanowire for the transfer to the nanochannel substrate. Vision-based method was used for the alignment to observe the nanowire and nanochannel at each step. The system revealed a high accuracy and reproducibility for the alignment and placement. The technique can provide an inexpensive ability for the assembly of the lab-on-a-chip devices.

Figure 2. Schematics of the nanowire alignment steps Results and Discussion Figure 3 shows the microscopic images of the nanochannel and nanowire after the the alignment. We zoomed on the nanochannel (from the backside of the PMMA substrate) and the nanowire through the nanochannel PMMA substrate by moving the both stages of the microscope in ‘z’ direction. In these steps, we indicated the nanowire (itself or its equivalent position on the nanochannel) by a red arrow on the right side of the nanowire. These images showed that we could align the nanowire perpendicular to the nanochannel first by rotating then by translating the nanochannel relative position to the nanowire using the current setup before releasing the vacuum.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Acknowledgement to LSU US for their support. REFERENCES Ansari, E., 2014, “Development of a surrogate simulator for two-phase subsurface flow simulation using trajectory piecewise linearization,” Journal of Petroleum Exploration and Production Technology, Vol. 4, pp. 315-325. Bartenwerfer, M. and S. Fatikow, 2011. "Directed nanorobot-based handling of single nanowires,” In 2011 IEEE International Conference on Mechatronics and Automation, IEEE, pp. 183-188.

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