  Thin film deposition technologies boost the development of modern
semiconductor industries. Being a fancy variant, vapor phase deposition on
metal nanoparticles (often in liquid phase) rather than on bare substrates
opens novel avenues of fabricating low-dimensional nanomaterials, which renders
the development of new device architectures and their applications in advanced
electronics, optoelectronics and photonics, etc. Since the last twenty years,
nanomaterials with various geometries (i.e. dots, wires, trees, tubes, flakes,
ribbons, etc.) have been synthesized via different bottom-up methods (i.e.
vapor-liquid-solid, vapor-solid-solid, in plane solid-liquid-solid, etc.) by
different deposition techniques (CVD, PECVD, MOCVD, MBE, etc.). In contrast
with liquid phase epitaxy where metal liquid severs as stationary reservoir
that accommodates gaseous precursors, metal droplets have to be kicked off
in-plane on/out-of-plane from the substrates so as to steer the growth of
low-dimensional nanomaterials. In this review, we shall regard the growth
process in a viewpoint of dynamic droplet evolution under vapor phase
deposition. We shall summarize several key factors that affect the droplet
spreading behaviors and their consequent nanofluidic transport, which involves
deposition parameters, solid-liquid interfaces, crystal phases, substrate
nanofacets and so on, which deterministically results in various morphologies
and growth directions of the nanomaterials. Reversely, the aspects like doping
profile and phase transition that are strongly dependent on the droplet
transport will also be discussed.
