Selective growth of vertical ZnO nanowires with the control of hydrothermal synthesis and nano-imprint technology.

Nano-imprint technology is one of the most advanced technologies for the fabrication of nano-size patterning. In this study, nano-imprint technology was used for the selective growth of ZnO nanowires on the Si wafer. When the poly methyl-methacrylate (PMMA) was first patterned by a nano-imprint process and ZnO seed layer was deposited and patterned by lift-off, ZnO nanowires were not vertically grown on the whole area of the patterned seed layer. Synthesis in zinc sulfate solution exhibited well-structured ZnO nanowires compared to the zinc nitrate solution, but uniformly aligned vertical growth of ZnO nanowires was not observed in either cases. On the other hand, when the PMMA was patterned using a nano-imprint process in the presence of seed layer, and ZnO nanowires were synthesized in zinc sulfate solution, selective growth of vertically aligned ZnO nanowires on 0.5 microm pattern sizes was achieved. The observation in this study suggests that the selective growth of ZnO nanowires on a defined pattern size can be obtained with the modification of pattering sequence and the control of low temperature hydrothermal synthesis of ZnO nanowires.