Nanoparticle-assisted alignment of carbon nanotubes on DNA origami.

Aligning carbon nanotubes (CNTs) is a key challenge for fabricating CNT-based electronic devices. Herein, we report a spherical nucleic acid (SNA) mediated approach for the highly precise alignment of CNTs at prescribed sites on DNA origami. We find that the cooperative DNA hybridization occurring at the interface of SNA and DNA-coated CNTs leads to an approximately five-fold improvement of the positioning efficiency. By combining this with the intrinsic positioning addressability of DNA origami, CNTs can be aligned in parallel with an extremely small angular variation of within 10 degrees. Moreover, we demonstrate that the parallel alignment of CNTs prevents incorrect logic functionality originating from stray conducting paths formed by misaligned CNTs. This SNA-mediated method thus holds great potential for fabricating scalable CNT arrays for nanoelectronics.