Liquid Metals - A New Tool in Micro and Nano Engineering

Dear Colleagues,

In the past twenty years, Micro and Nano Fabrication (MNF) passed from being a branch of electronic engineering to a much more fascinating (in our very personal opinion) multidisciplinary field. Today MNF scientists deal one day with an email requesting the feasibility for devices to measure ions in the solar wind and mounted on a probe launched toward our Sun, the day after with physicians planning to connect micro-sensors with neurons to help people to hear or see again. In this context, moving parts and connections, transport of mass and heat, reconfigurable or self-healing parts, stretchable components, … and so on, constitute part of the problems that have to be addressed in the day by day work, often keeping also an eye to the usability for non-tech final users. Liquid metals and liquid metal alloys have been part of the solution in several scientist’ minds since the wonderful demonstration, in 2002, of a gallium based carbon nanothermometer, but it is only in the last couple of years that the application of liquid metals emerged from the fog as a potential tool in microsystems fabrication and nanotechnology thanks to their peculiar physical chemical and mechanical properties.

In the spirit to foster the discussion about liquid metal based applications, we propose this Special Issue is to provide a “micromachines” focused environment  to deepen current challenges toward industrial applications and future research orientation of this field. We invite to discuss practical approaches to deploy LM potential in micro and nano systems. Their inclusion in finite element methods and techniques for computational fluid dynamics is certainly an interesting point to improve LM based system design, as the description of chemical and physical properties at the meso and nanoscale could reval innovative solution for sensing applications and material transfer. These approaches merged with more straightforward applications such as stretchable electronics, free form optics, 3D “soft” mechanical system, just to neme few, will in our opinion bring LM to becaome a novel and important actor in the “micromachines” world.

Dr. Luca Businaro
Dr. Adele De Ninno
Guest Editors

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• micorfluidics
• stretchable electronics
• material science
• adaptive optics
• liquid metals