Surface energy driven agglomeration and growth of single crystal metal wires

We introduce a novel wire growth technique that involves simply heating a multilayer film specifically designed to take advantage of the different surface energies of the substrate and film components. In all cases the high surface energy component is extruded as a single crystal nanowire. Moreover we demonstrate that patterning the bilayer film generates localized surface agglomeration waves during the anneal that can be exploited to position the grown wires. Examples of Au and Cu nanowire growth are presented, and the generalization of this method to other systems is discussed.