Controlled fabrication of hierarchical metal nanostructures

Hierarchical metal nanostructures (HMNS) have attracted great interests for applications in electronics, catalysis, and sensors. Here, we report a novel method to prepare hierarchical metal nanorods arrays by combining superplastic nanomolding with dealloying. The fabricated sample possesses size as large as centimeters and with uniform hierarchical metal nanorods chemically attached in its surface, which guarantees the structural stability of the HMNS. This is distinct with other techniques, where assembling nanostructures on the macroscale with good uniformity and maintaining good mechanical stability has general challenging. We further show that the microstructures in HMNS can be tuned through independent ways, which provides the possibility to study microstructure-property relationship. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.