Self-chaining of nanoparticles in polymethyl methacrylate through electrode-free dielectrophoresis

Nanoparticles are drawing tremendous attention due to their great potential as building blocks in nanoelectronics and photonics. In particular, it is highly desirable to control their orientation and assembly: incorporating nanowires into thin polymer films is interesting to obtain materials with anisotropic optical, thermal and structural features that can be potentially used as conductive films for semiconductor packaging and electromechanical connections in liquid crystal displays [1, 2]. The most of these approaches for manipulating and chaining conductive nanoparticles often require voltages by external electrodes and, usually, report the growth velocity as a function of electric potential and electrode spacing [1, 3].