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Spontaneous formation of nanoparticle stripe patterns through dewetting

Nature Materials volume 4, pages 896–900 (2005)Cite this article

Abstract

Significant advancement has been made in nanoparticle research, with synthetic techniques extending over a wide range of materials with good control over particle size and shape1,2,3,4,5,6. A grand challenge is assembling and positioning the nanoparticles in desired locations to construct complex, higher-order functional structures. Controlled positioning of nanoparticles has been achieved in pre-defined templates fabricated by top–down approaches7,8. A self-assembly method, however, is highly desirable because of its simplicity and compatibility with heterogeneous integration processes. Here we report on the spontaneous formation of ordered gold and silver nanoparticle stripe patterns on dewetting a dilute film of polymer-coated nanoparticles floating on a water surface. Well-aligned stripe patterns with tunable orientation, thickness and periodicity at the micrometre scale were obtained by transferring nanoparticles from a floating film onto a substrate in a dip-coating fashion. This facile technique opens up a new avenue for lithography-free patterning of nanoparticle arrays for various applications including, for example, multiplexed surface-enhanced Raman substrates and templated fabrication of higher-order nanostructures.

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Figure 1: Spoke pattern formation.
Figure 2: Extended stripe pattern formation through dip-coating.
Figure 3: The stripe pattern dictated by the moving contact line.
Figure 4: Tuning stripe dimension by changing the surface pressure of the water-supported nanoparticle film.

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Acknowledgements

We thank R. Fan, H. Yan, T. Kuykendall and P. Pauzauskie for technical assistance and helpful discussions. This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (CAREER) and the Office of Basic Science, Department of Energy. J.H. gratefully acknowledges the Miller Institute for Basic Research in Science for a postdoctoral fellowship. A.R.T. gratefully acknowledges the National Science Foundation for a graduate research fellowship. S.C. gratefully acknowledges a summer undergraduate research fellowship through Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems (COINS). We thank the National Center for Electron Microscopy for the use of their facilities.

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  1. Jiaxing Huang, Franklin Kim and Andrea R. Tao: These authors contributed equally to this work

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Jiaxing Huang, Franklin Kim, Andrea R. Tao, Stephen Connor & Peidong Yang

  2. Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, 94720, USA

    Jiaxing Huang, Franklin Kim, Andrea R. Tao, Stephen Connor & Peidong Yang

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  1. Jiaxing Huang
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  2. Franklin Kim
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Correspondence to Peidong Yang.

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Supplementary information

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Huang, J., Kim, F., Tao, A. et al. Spontaneous formation of nanoparticle stripe patterns through dewetting. Nature Mater 4, 896–900 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1517

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