Electrical characteristics of AC dielectrophoretically aligned ZnO nanowires

We report on a straightforward and successful AC dielectrophoresis (DEP) method that can be used to align and manipulate ZnO nanowires as well as for extracting the electrical properties of the semiconductor nanowires. The dielectrophoresis was accomplished at a frequency of 20 MHz with five different AC electric field (1, 5, 10, 15, 20 Vp.p). The DEP results indicated that the number of aligned ZnO nanowires increased with increasing AC voltages. From the transport measurements of our AC DEP prepared ZnO nanowires using conventional three-probe schemes in field-effect transistor structures, the estimated carrier mobility from the gate-modulation characteristics was on the order of~15.9 cm²/V dot dots. We found that AC DEP offers great opportunities for electrical characteristics of semiconductor nanowires and for further fundamental research in electronics and photonics device applications.