A little ribbing: Flux starvation engineering for rippled indium tin oxide nanotree branches

Combining vapour-liquid-solid growth with glancing angle deposition (VLS-GLAD) facilitates fabrication of branched nanowires not possible with either technique alone. Indium tin oxide (ITO) nanostructures grown by VLS-GLAD produce extremely porous nanotree structures, where periodic branch diameter oscillations are sometimes observed. We explain this rippled branch growth with a simple model linking the physics governing branch growth to the process variables controlled in VLS-GLAD. The model is verified by inducing specific, aperiodic ripples onto growing ITO branches through macroscopic vapour flux control and manipulation of local shadowing.