C 2011 American Chemical Society Strain-Release Assembly of Nanowires on Stretchable Substrates

ver the past decade, both semi-conductor and metallic nanowires (NWs) have been actively explored as building blocks for next-generation elec-tronics, optoelectronics, and sensors,1-3 in-cluding flexible and transparent devices4-8 aswell as stretchable devices9. A critical step in constructing NW-based devices is assem-bly (including transfer, alignment and den-sity control) of NWs on a substrate for device fabrication. Scalable and controlled assem-bly of NWs synthesized with diverse meth-ods (e.g., wet or dry methods) on diverse substrates (e.g., silicon, plastics, and rubbers) presents a major fabrication challenge tha