Tailoring self-organized nanostructured morphologies in kilometer-long polymer fiber

While nanowires and nanospheres have been utilized in the design of a diverse array of nanoscale devices, recent schemes frequently require nanoscale architectures of higher complexity. However, conventional techniques are largely unsatisfactory for the production of more intricate nanoscale shapes and patterns, and even successful fabrication methods are incompatible with large-scale production efforts. Novel top-down, iterative size reduction (ISR)-mediated approaches have recently been shown to be promising for the production of high-throughput cylindrical and spherical nanostructures, though more complex architectures have yet to be created using this process. Here we report the presence of a hitherto-undescribed transitory region between nanowire and nanosphere transformation, where a diverse array of complex quasi one-dimensional nanostructures is produced by Rayleigh-Plateau instability-mediated deformation during the progress of a combined ISR/thermal instability technique. Temperature-based tailoring of architecturally diverse, indefinitely long, globally parallel, complex nanostructure arrays with high uniformity and low size variation facilitates the development of in-fiber or free-standing nanodevices with significant advantages over on-chip devices.