Metal Oxide Nanostructures and Nanoarchitectures

Metal oxide nanostructures and nanoarchitectures have been finding their way into a plethora of applications ranging from optoelectronic to sensing devices, catalysis and photovoltaics. Hydrothermal and solvothermal synthesis and growth techniques used for their production have gained significant popularity, since they are an inexpensive and relatively facile means to obtain -through tuning of simple parameters- 3-dimensional nanostructures characterized by structural complexity, hierarchy and multiple functionalities.

Within this activity, the Optical Biosensors Group taking advantage of the cost-efficiency, but most importantly the versatility of these approaches, has set out to explore how hydrothermally/solvothermally synthesized and grown nanostructures of Zno, CuO and NiO may be tailored-made and integrated onto silicon in order to create new classes of optoelectronic and sensing devices. The Group is following a 4-step approach. The first step is in essence the development of methodologies to “create” the nanostructures and nanoarchitectures, while the second step involves their morphological and structural characterization in order to correlate the morphologies to the process parameters and to develop methodologies for custom-made materials. The third step focuses on studying the compatibility of the developed methodologies with mainstream micro/nanofabrication techniques and hence developing appropriate and optimized process flows for devices that integrate the novel metal oxide nanostructures or exploit polymer nanocomposite resistes with metal oxide nanofillers. At the fourth and final step, the devices created by the fusion of the standard micro/nanoelectronics techniques and the chemically-based methodologies are tested and characterized.

At the same time, the metal oxide nanostructures are explored for other less-conventional uses, with the most recent one pertaining to the mechanical support of wooden artefacts.