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1. IRG-III Highlight: Thermal drawn fibers can be used to create high-density macroscopic arrays of well-ordered nanowires Michael F. Rubner, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, DMR 0819762 Authors: A. F. Abouraddy and Y. Fink Nanowires produced by bottom-up approaches have a wide range of applications in nano-electronics,energy harvesting, photonic devices, sensing, and interfacing electronics with live cells. Limitations to this approach however, have hampered full development of these materials. Abouraddy and Fink have demonstrated that the top-down process of thermal fiber drawing may be used to produce macroscopic lengths of sub-5-nm-diameter nanowires in high-density, well-ordered, globally oriented arrays. The fibers containing the nanowire arrays are drawn from a cylindrical preform containing the nanowire material in the core encased in a polymer scaffold cladding. Such nanowire arrays are expected to find applications in nanosensing, nanoimaging using nanowire tips, and energy harvesting. The robustness of the nanowire bundles and their encasement in a polymer matrix scaffold further suggests important applications in live cell bioprobing. 570 nm 200 nm 100 nm SEM micrographs of ordered nanowire arrays after removal of the polymer cladding. J. J. Kaufman, G. Tao, S. Shabahang, D. S. Deng, Y. Fink, and A. F. Abouraddy, “Thermal drawing of high-density macroscopic arrays of well-ordered sub-5-nm-diameter nanowires,” Nano Letters 11, 4768-4773 (2011).