Topologically Guided Nanowire Arrays on Teflon Cloth for Bending-Stable Photodetector Integration and Optical Communication

Abstract

The integration of nanowires into flexible optoelectronics remains constrained by the incompatibility of lattice-matching epitaxy with amorphous substrates and performance degradation from post-growth assembly. Herein, a universal strategy is proposed for large-scale oriented growth of nanowires on arbitrary substrates. By decoupling alignment from conventional lattice-matching paradigms through topological guidance of amorphous nanogrooves, large-area horizontally-aligned metal phthalocyanine nanowires with consistent crystallographic axes are achieved on challenging substrates, including flexible Teflon cloth, printing paper, rigid glass, silicon wafer, and iron foil. In situ integrated flexible photodetectors using CuPc nanowire arrays on Teflon cloths exhibit broadband sensitivity (400–1100 nm), detectivity up to 10⁹ Jones, and millisecond response speeds. Mechanical robustness is demonstrated with stable operation under high bending stress (0.75 cm curvature radius) and over 1000 bending cycles. A 9 × 9 photodetector array showcases scalability, featuring consistent photoresponse across all pixels. A prototype optical communication system validates real-world applicability, decoding Morse code signals at high speed (0.1 ms for dot) and translating light pulses into alphanumeric characters without latency or errors. This strategy bridges lab-scale nanowire growth and deployable flexible optoelectronics, combining substrate-agnostic alignment, in situ device fabrication, system-level scalability, and bending-stable operation to address integration challenges in nanowires-based wearable technologies.