Abstract Submitted to the ; NT'05-Logo NANOTUBE'05 Conference:

The influence of different metal underlayers on vertically aligned carbon nanofibers grown from Ni dots by PE-CVD

R.E. Morjan1*, M.S. Kabir2, O.A. Nerushev1,3, P. Lundgren2, E.E. B. Campbell1 and P. Enokson2

1Dept. of Physics, Göteborg University, SE-41296 Göteborg, Sweden, 2Dept. of Microtechnology and Nanoscience (MC2), Chalmers University of Technology, SE-41296, Göteborg, Sweden, 3 Permanent address: Institute of Thermophysics, 630090, Novosibirsk, Russia
Contact e-mail: ralumax@fy.chalmers.se

Growth of carbon nanotubes on metal electrodes constitutes one of the important issues for electronic devices manufacturing. The future development of such technology will rely to a large extent on the ability to grow the nanotubes directly on devices and to achieve good electrical contact between the nanotube and electrodes. Vertically aligned carbon nanofibers (VACNFs) represent a kind of carbon nanotubes whose growth can be very easily controlled by plasma enhanced chemical vapor deposition. Therefore they represent good candidates for developing CNT-based nanodevice production. This work is focused on growing these nanostructures on nickel (Ni) patterned substrates where metal underlayers were pre-deposited on SiO2. Recently, we have performed a thorough study [1] of VACNFs growth on un-patterned substrates when a thin intermediate Si layer was deposited between the Ni catalyst layer and the metal underlayer film. We observed that the Si/metal interaction occurring durin g growth plays a vital role in nanostructure formation for metals such as: W, Mo, Pt, Pd. The growth of VACNF on metal underlayers such as Ti, Cr is still under investigation.
Electron beam lithography was used to fabricate Ni dots. Preliminary results show that individual VACNFs grew from 50 nm dots and their diameter changed depending on the dose modulation of the electron beam used at the initial stage of pattern fabrication. For 100 nm dots, the Ni catalyst tends to split into several islands resulting in the growth of more than one nanofiber. The growth of VACNFs was also investigated for smaller dot sizes (10 and 20nm). Samples were characterized with SEM, TEM and EDX .
References:
[1] M.S. Kabir, R.E. Morjan, O.A. Nerushev, P. Lundgren, S. Bengtsson, P. Enokson and E.E.B. Campbell, Nanotechnology, 16, (2005), 458-466

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