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The new process allows considerable flexibility in fabrication, opening the possibility of depositing more than one material simultaneously. That could allow production of alloys and composites, such as combinations of silver and gold. Or, one material could be used as a template to be coated by another material with the simple substitution of precursor materials.
So far, the Georgia Tech team has produced structures of silver and carbon, but the process could be used to fabricate a wide range of metallic and non-metallic nanomaterials. Metals produced using the technique can be highly pure because a carbon-producing precursor dissociation step can be mitigated.
The next step will be to understand the physics and chemistry governing the fabrication process to allow more precise control and to guide others who may wish to use it for their own specific applications.
“We expect that the role of the solvents is going to be very important in the kinds of kinetic pathways that we can control to produce many different kinds of structures with desired chemical make-up,” said Fedorov. “This gives us an opportunity to explore a regime of chemistry and physics that had previously been outside what we could study. We want to establish an understanding of the basic physics and chemistry of the process.”
Future work will include a study of how the interaction of beams with different energies, vacuum environments, solvents and concentrations of ionic species affect the outcome.
“We have demonstrated that we can electrospray liquid precursors inside a high vacuum environment of an electron microscope and then use electrons to facilitate useful chemical transformations,” said Fedorov. “We think this will enable scientists and engineers to make structures they had only been able to dream of before.”
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