Highly Uniform, Straightforward, Controllable Fabrication of Copper Nano-Objects via Artificial Nucleation-Assisted Electrodeposition

International audience; Electrochemical synthetic route to sophisticated nano-objects has been considered as a promising and reliable strategy for diverse purpose in a wide range of applications. Especially, electrodeposition using nanoporous templates has attracted intensive research interests due to the potential for realizing diverse nanostructures and delicate composition control of the resulting fabricated materials. Unfortunately, the electrochemically filling of nanomaterials into nanoporous templates are still suffering from unexpected non-uniform formation of nanoobjects, originating from random nucleation in each nanopore and overgrowth from only a few nanopores. Here, we present a highly uniform, straightforward and controllable fabrication of Cu nano-objects via artificial nucleation-assisted electrodeposition principle using nanoporous AAO templates. Pre-electrodeposited Ni nanoparticles at the bottom of the nanopores of AAO successfully plays a role as a nucleus at the early stage of Cu electrodeposition process. The artificial nuclei enable highly uniform and stable Cu electrodeposition inside the nanopores of AAO templates by effectively suppressing the random overgrowth of Cu. Taking advantage of the stable electrodepositing behavior, we demonstrate precise control of the geometry of Cu nano-objects, uniformly dispersed over whole surfaces of substrates.