Design and Fabrication of Electromechanical Tweezers based on CNT Ropes

International audienceThis paper deals with the design, modeling, fabrication and electrical characterization of electromechanical tweezers fabricated with carbon nanotubes (CNT) ropes. We used vertically grown multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) deposited by CVD technique. In this work we show a novel approach to develop CNTs tweezersconsisting of two arms of vertically aligned CNT ropes that will operate electromechanically. The device was fabricated by optical lithography combined with lift-off process. The same fabrication technique has been used to obtain prepatterned catalyst dots on patterned electrodes which results on CNT ropes on predefined locations. These ropes have 3 =m in diameter and 35 =m in length. The pull-in voltage measured on a first prototype was about 20 V for a tweezers gap of 5 =m. We calculated the moment of inertia of CNT rope and its average Young's modulus in order to calculate the pull-in voltage of CNT rope tweezers