Constructing self-organized structures on silicon and sapphire surfaces

We investigated methods to fabricate distinctive structures on silicon and sapphire substrates to grow a carbon nanotube (CNT) network using a solution from the Belousov–Zhabotinsky (BZ) reaction. The BZ reaction is a chemical system where chemical reactions and material diffusion coexist in a nonequilibrium state and generate spatiotemporal patterns in a petri dish. Precipitates from the reaction should also produce distinctive structures after being piled on the substrates. The structures have metal particles that act as catalysts for growing CNTs or quantum dots of nanodot devices. Therefore, such structures should be suitable to fabricate three-dimensional CNT networks or nanodot devices. To confirm this, we investigated the fabrication of distinctive structure using a BZ reaction solution. Results indicated that the BZ reaction solution produced interesting structures on the substrates. Moreover, we confirmed that the shape of the structure changed when the substrate used was changed. We believe that the developed methods are suitable to fabricate nanodevices, especially CNT network devices.