A Comparison of nanowire production methodologies: Copper electrodeposition into etched ion-track polycarbonate and porous anodised aluminium oxide templates

TL;DRAbstract

Metal wires have been found to have increasing yield strengths with decreasing diameters in the sub-micron regime. Previous work in Manchester has shown that there is a universal scaling law for FCC metals. A lack of reliable method for the production of nanowires below 200nm in diameter has resulted in there being few studies of wires below this size. Electrodeposition into a template is a promising method for producing wires of sufficiently low diameter. Two templates were compared: commercially available etched ion-track polycarbonate filters (EMD Millipore Corporation, Billerica, MA, USA), and porous anodised aluminium oxide films grown by a two-stage anodising process.Electrodeposition into the polycarbonate templates was successful, with a pore filling rate of 90% achieved. However the templates were found to have a larger than specified pore diameter and a large variation in the size of the pores (970nm � 245nm for templates specified as 800nm). This was due to overlapping pores

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