Mechanical Behaviour of Hybrid Polymer/Semiconductor Microtubes

This work focuses on the fabrication and analysis of hybrid polymer/semiconductor microtubes realized by self-rolling technique. They consist of alternated PEI/PAA polymer multilayers deposited on strained semiconductor In0.2Ga0.8As/GaAs bilayer. To investigate their mechanical and elastic properties, force-distance measurements were carried out on both semiconductor and hybrid channels with different polymer thickness, revealing reinforced tubes due to the polymer multilayer presence and an increase of the stiffness by increasing either the number of multilayers or the number of wrappings. Additionally hybrid microtubes were post-processed thus exposing the inner polymer surface and demonstrating the possibility of engineer more complex architectures.