Assembling Functional Nanowire Yarns with Light
US Nano’s Louise Sinks and University of Notre Dame scientists have developed a method to assemble nanowires into functional macroscale objects. Dr. Nattasamon Petschsang, a post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Kuno discovered that nanowires could be aligned using light and electrostatic energy. This technique, named Light Induced Nanowire Assembly (LINA) enables the development of photovoltaic fabrics. More information about this method can be found at the Nanowerk website, which recently wrote an article on Light Induced Nanowire Assembly (LINA), and is featured below.
(Nanowerk Spotlight) Nanoscale materials like quantum dots, carbon nanotubes, graphene, or nanowires, have intriguing properties, but unless they can be assembled in to larger structures it is difficult to take advantage of these properties. Figuring out how to assemble nanostructures into functional macroscale assemblies is one of the key challenges that nanoscientists around the world are faced with. This is akin to supramolecular chemistry except with nanomaterials. In the area of nanowires, this has led to researchers exploring various nanowire assembly techniques ranging from Langmuir Blodgett alignment to electrospinning…