Capillarity induced large area patterning of peptide nanowires.

Peptide nanostructures assembled from an aromatic diphenylalanine have attracted considerable attention because of high thermal and mechanical stabilities of the assembled morphologies. Of diverse assembled structures, liquid crystalline peptide nanowires exhibiting optical and mechanical anisotropies can be a valuable building block for micro- or nano-fluidics, molecular electronics, and biological sensing. In this work, we investigated large scale patterning of liquid crystalline peptide nanowires and pattern transfer. The peptide nanowires could be highly aligned on a substrate by capillary flow over a large area. The high etching resistivity of nanowires to subsequent reactive ion etching process allowed for a successful pattern transfer of the well-aligned nanowire morphology onto the underlying SiO2 substrate.