中研院原分所 表面奈米結構實驗室

 Surface Nanostructure Lab 


Research Highlights

My primary research interest is to discover or create an ensemble of nanostructures with specific size, shape, and arrangement on specific positions in space. This subject is considered to be one the most fundamentally important issues in the exploration of nanoscience and realization of nanotechnology. My group has been exploring and exploiting the concept of ‘constrained self-organization’, which means to impose a set of constraining rules on a particle self-organization process in order to select a small desired subgroup from numerous possible outcomes of the process. The concept is attractive for realizing the dream of nanotechnology, i.e., to be able to quickly manipulate materials on the atomic scale, because ‘constrained self-organization’ is intrinsically a massive parallel process that is necessary for any viable technology aimed to create a large array of identical nanostructures with atomic scale precision in a reasonable time scale.

 

In the past twenty years, my group and collaborators have discovered several cases to demonstrate the concept of ‘constrained self-organization’ using the self-assembly of atoms and molecules on single-crystal surfaces and the self-organization of anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) nanochannels as platforms. Applying the same fascinating concept of ‘constrained self-organization’, we have also used arrays of AAO nanochannels to grow arrays of Ag-nanoparticles exhibiting large/uniform surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) activity as well as arrays of Ag and Au nanowires exhibiting unique physical properties of metamaterials. Highlights of these examples are described as follows.

1. Discovery of magic-number cluster of atoms and molecules on surfaces

Direct Observation of Two Dimensional Magic Clusters
Phys. Rev. Lett. 1998 

Self-Organized Two-Dimensional Lattice of Magic Clusters
Phys. Rev. B. 2001 

Broken Even/Odd Symmetry in Self-Selection of Distances between Nanoclusters due to Presence/Absence of Topological Solitons
Phys. Rev. Lett. 2011

Stepwise Self-Assembly of C60 Mediated by Atomic Scale Moiré Magnifiers 3

Nature Communications 2013 

2. Fabrication and applications of anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) nanochannels with custom-designed geometry

Ordered Anodic Alumina Nano-channels on Focused-Ion-beam Prepatterned Aluminum Surfaces 

Appl. Phys. Lett. 2001  

Enhanced Performance and Stability of Polymer Solar Cell by Incorporating Vertically Aligned, Cross-Linked Fullerene Nanorods 

Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. 2011   

Custom-designed arrays of anodic alumina nanochannels with individually tunable pore sizes

Nanotech. 2014

Looking into Meta-Atoms of Plasmonic Nanowire Metamaterial 

Nano Lett. 2014  

3. Fabrication and applications of Ag-nanoparticle arrays with large and uniform surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) activity

Highly Raman Enhancing Substrates Made of
Ag-Nanoparticle Array with Tunable Sub-10 nm Gaps

Adv. Matt. 2006, USA Patent 2008 

A High Speed Detection Platform Based on Surface-Enhanced Raman Scattering for Monitoring Antibiotic-Induced Chemical Changes in Bacteria Cell Wall 

Plos One 2009  

Funtionalized Arrays of Raman-Enhancing Nanoparticles for Capture and Culture-Free Analysis of Bacteria in Human Blood 

Nat. Comm. 2011 

4. Rapid antibiotic susceptibility testing of bacteria from patients’ blood culture via assaying bacterial metabolic response using SERS