Spiraling nanotrees offer new twist on growth of nanowires

“We think these findings will motivate a lot of people to do this purposefully, to design dislocation and try to grow nanowires around it,” Jin says. “Or perhaps people who have grown a structure and were puzzled by it will read our paper and say, ‘Hey, we see something similar in our system, so maybe now we have the solution.’”

What initially puzzled Jin and his students about their pine tree structures was the long length of the trunks compared with the branches, a difference that indicated the trunks were growing much faster. The result was surprising because when complex, branching nanostructures are grown with metal catalysts, the branches are usually all of similar length because of similar growth rates, leading to boxy shapes rather than the cone-shapes of the trees.

Another oddity was the twist to the trunks, which sent the branches spiraling.

“The long and twisting trunks were telling us we had a new growth mode,” says Jin. Suspecting dislocation, the team set about refining their technique for growing the pine trees – they soon learned to produce entire forests with ease – and then confirmed the presence of dislocations with a special type of transmission electron microscopy.

Upon closer examination, the twisting trunks and spiraling branches also turned out to embody a well-known general theory about the mechanical deformation of crystalline materials caused by screw dislocations. Although this so-called “Eshelby twist” was first calculated back in 1953 and is discussed in many textbooks, Jin’s experimental results likely offer the best support yet for the theory.

“These are beautiful, truly intriguing structures, but behind them is also a really beautiful, interesting science,” says Jin. “Once you understand it, you just feel so…satisfied.”

The paper’s other authors are Y.K. Albert Lau, Alexander Kvit and Andrew Schmitt. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

-Madeline Fisher, (608) 890-0465,