Creating anodic alumina nanochannel arrays with custom-made geometry

Porous anodic alumina oxide (AAO) is one of the most commonly used nanotemplates for growing arrays of nanoparticles, nanowires, nanocomposites, and nanoarchitectures because its pores, which are of a very uniform size, can grow longitudinally into arrays of self-aligned nanochannels with an extremely high aspect ratio. Furthermore, under specific combinations of anodization voltage and electrolyte, the lateral positions of nanochannels can self-organize into arrays of two-dimensional hexagonally close-packed lattices with domain sizes on the order of few tens of lattice units. The domain size can be greatly increased by prepatterning the Al surface with custom-designed nanoconcaves prior to the anodization process. The concaves guide the growth fronts of nanochannels and lead to the formation of an ideally long-range ordered lattice of nanochannel array. Such concaves have been fabricated by many methods, such as stamp imprinting, grating imprinting, and focused ion beam direct writing. In this review, we summarize the development of various methods to create AAO nanochannel arrays with custom-made geometry and discuss the mechanism responsible for the guiding process.