Good hair day: New technique grows tiny 'hairy' materials at the microscale

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DOE/Argonne National Laboratory
Good hair day: New technique grows tiny 'hairy' materials at the microscale

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory attacked a tangled problem by developing a new technique to grow tiny "hairy" materials that assemble themselves at the microscale.

The key ingredient is epoxy, which is added to a mixture of hardener and solvent inside an electric cell. Then the scientists run an alternating current through the cell and watch long, twisting fibers spring up. It looks like the way Chia Pets grow in commercials.

"The process is very simple, the materials are cheap and available and they can grow on almost every surface we've tried," said Argonne physicist Igor Aronson, who co-authored the study.

By tweaking the process, the team can grow many different shapes: short forests of dense straight hairs, long branching strands or "mushrooms" with tiny pearls at the tips. Interestingly, though the structures can be permanent, the process is also instantly reversible.

"This is a completely new kind of structure," said Argonne physicist Alexey Snezhko, also a co-author. "With this method, you can support more complex structures that have unique properties."

Scientists are very interested in materials with tiny fibers for technologies like batteries, photovoltaic cells or sensors. For one, "hairy" materials offer up a lot of surface area. Many chemical reactions depend on two surfaces making contact with one another, so a structure that exposes a lot of surface area will speed the process along. (For example, grinding coffee beans gives the coffee more flavor than soaking whole beans in water.) Micro-size hairs can also make a surface that repels water, called superhydrophobic, or dust.

The tiny-fiber structure is so useful that it's evolved several times in nature, Aronson pointed out. For example, blood vessels are lined with a layer of similar tiny protein "hairs," thought to help reduce wear and tear by blood cells and bacterial infections, among other properties.

Currently, the primary methods of creating interesting shapes at small scales is lithography, a type of "printing" where researchers lay a pattern on the material and the rest of it is melted or etched away. But it's hard to make very complex structures with this method; it's hard to control; and the results aren't always uniform.

"These polymers assemble themselves," Snezhko explained, "which is much easier and less labor-intensive than lithography."

In one experiment the researchers used a process called atomic layer deposition that deposits a molecule-thick layer of material over the entire hairy structure, like a fresh blanket of snow, to add a layer of semiconductor material. Semiconductors are essential ingredients in many technologies, such as solar cells and electronics.

This provided proof of concept that the polymer could be incorporated into semiconductor-based renewable energy technologies. It also proved that it could survive high temperatures, up to 150°C, an essential property for many manufacturing processes.

Right now the structures are about a single micron thick—you could stack 100 of them to reach the width of a sheet of paper. Aronson and Snezhko said their next goal is to get them even smaller, to the nanoscale.

VIDEO: These tiny "hairs " assemble themselves almost instantly when scientists apply an alternating electrical current. The entire field of view is smaller than the thickness of a credit card. Argonne National...
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INFORMATION:

The study, "Self-assembled tunable networks of sticky colloidal particles," was published last week in Nature Communications. Argonne scientists Arnaud Demortière and Thomas Proslier were co-authors on the study, along with Nicholas Becker (Illinois Institute of Technology) and Maksim Sapozhnikov (Russian Academy of Sciences and N.I. Lobachevsky State University).

Funding for the research came from the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science and the Russian Foundation for Basic Research. Use of Argonne's Center for Nanoscale Materials to characterize the samples was supported by the DOE's Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences.

Argonne National Laboratory seeks solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology. The nation's first national laboratory, Argonne conducts leading-edge basic and applied scientific research in virtually every scientific discipline. Argonne researchers work closely with researchers from hundreds of companies, universities, and federal, state and municipal agencies to help them solve their specific problems, advance America's scientific leadership and prepare the nation for a better future. With employees from more than 60 nations, Argonne is managed by UChicago Argonne, LLC for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.

The Center for Nanoscale Materials at Argonne National Laboratory is one of the five DOE Nanoscale Science Research Centers (NSRCs), premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale, supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE's Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge and Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories.

DOE's Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States, and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit science.energy.gov.