Tunable Ag Nanowires Grown on Cu(110)-Based Templates

Metallic nanostructures have unique properties concerning, for instance, their optical excitation and the propagation of plasmons. These properties are strongly correlated with the geometry of the nanostructures. We present a method to tune and even invert the length-to-width ratio of Ag nanowires grown on Cu(110)-based templates by molecular beam epitaxy. While the dimension of the nanowires along the [001] surface direction is determined by surface strain effects, the template structure limits the growth along the orthogonal [1 (1) over bar0] direction. The resulting nanowires are analyzed by scanning tunneling microscopy, and a statistical evaluation of the data is presented that confirms the high uniformity of the resulting nanowires.