Maxime LEGALLAIS, the October laureate of NanoART 2015

Prize-winner of nanoART 2015

Maxime LEGALLAIS, our October winner, started his PhD on October 2014 at IMEP-LaHC and LMGP, with Mireille Mouis from IMEP-LAHC and Céline Ternon from LMGP as supervisors. The aim of his PhD is to study the electrical properties of silicon nanonets (acronym of NANOstructured NETwork) made of randomly oriented silicon nanowires. This work has been done during the fabrication of the silicon nanonets for his PhD.
NanoRibbon for the World AIDS Day
NanoRibbon for the World AIDS Day

After growth of silicon nanowires by Vapor-Liquid-Solid process onto wafer, they are dispersed in deionized water by sonication. Then, nanonets are formed during the filtration of this solution through a membrane. Finally, they are transferred onto a substrate by membrane dissolution. The image has been obtained during the morphological characterization by SEM of the nanonet after its transfer. During the filtration process, one of the nanowires surprisingly formed a loop, with an impressively small radius of curvature. As it evoked the World AIDS Day symbol, a red ribbon has been overlapped on it to emphasize resemblance.
Silicon nanowires have been grown by Thierry Baron, Bassem Salem and Thierry Luciani from LTM. Then, the fabrication and characterizations of the nanonets have been made by Maxime.
Thanks to this work, he is currently integrating these nanonets into field effect transistors by standard microelectronic processes (such as photolithography, wet and dry etching, metallic evaporation, thermal annealing). He is also characterizing electrically these devices by probe measurement as a function of network density, channel length, doping level of silicon nanowires. Finally, DNA biosensors will be fabricated with these nanonet-based transistors.
Furthermore, his PhD will be supported by the H2020 European Project called "Nanonets2Sense" from February 2016.
After his thesis, Maxime will probably go to USA in order to perform post-doctoral research and/or to find a job there.