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Herein, a stacked Ge/Cu nanowire (NW) laminate made by stacking several Ge/Cu nanowire laminates accompanied by the conductive glue adhesives is used to achieve high capacity output per unit area (>10 mA h cm–2). The combination of Cu NWs and conductive adhesives constructs a tough and conducting network through the electrode, and the stacked Ge/Cu nanowire laminate electrodes can load an ultrahigh mass of 14.8 mg Ge per unit area and provide an areal capacity output over 16 mA h cm–2. A full-cell with an areal capacity of 11 mA h cm–2 built by stacked Ge/Cu nanowire laminate anode and Li(Ni0.5Co0.3Mn0.2)O2 cathode was prepared and used to supply electricity for electronic devices, demonstrating their potential to be a candidate anode for high areal capacity Li-ion microbatteries that can be used for high-tech and integrated microsystems with limited space.

Metallic nanostructures possessing higher surface-to-volume ratio provide a more accessible surface to catalyze chemical reactions compared to the bulk materials. However, scaling up the nanostructures remains complicated and limits the applications as industrial catalysis. Here, we demonstrate a facile method to fabricate a robust and versatile Cu nanostructure at a centimeter scale as an efficient photothermal catalytic reactor. By drop-casting the solution of Cu nanowires into a Teflon mold after solvent evaporation followed by annealing in the H2/Ar atmosphere, a Cu nanowire fabric possessing a network structure with a high density of porosity is formed. The Cu fabric exhibits a strong absorptance at the spectral range of 400–1200 nm owing to the interband transition, the surface plasmon resonances of Cu nanowires with their near-field coupling, and “light trapped effect” in the network structures. Exposure to 808 nm laser allows for the elevation of the temperature across the whole structure within 2 s and maintaining a stable temperature up to 250 °C for 2 h. A heterogeneous copper-catalyzed azide-alkyne cycloaddition reaction is performed using Cu nanowire fabric illuminated by an 808 nm laser. A repeatable yield of >90% with a reaction time of 4 h, an order of magnitude shorter than conventional copper catalysts at ambient temperature, is achieved suggesting the Cu nanowire fabric as a robust photothermal catalytic reactor.