Large-Scale Fabrication of Suspended, Aligned, and Strained Single-Walled Carbon Nanotube Networks

Large-scale fabrication of suspended single-walled carbon nanotubes remains a challenge, especially at specific locations and in specific directions. In this work, we demonstrate an effective, fast and large-scale technique to fabricate suspended, strained, and aligned SWNT networks, which is based on a dynamic motion of silver liquid to suspend and align the SWNTs between each two prefabricated palladium patterns in high temperature. The SWNTs are aligned in eight directions: up, down, left, right, upper right, lower right, upper left, and lower left. The simulated calculations show that the driving force leading the silver liquid motion on the substrate is around 0.66 μN. The Raman spectra of the SWNTs network were measured, and the downshift of the G+ band indicates that, for the suspended SWNTs, the uniaxial strain is around 0.13%. This technique could be extended to two-dimensional material systems and open the pathway toward better optoelectronic and nanoelectromechanical systems