Article abstract


Nature Materials 6, 686 - 691 (2007)
Published online: 5 August 2007 | doi:10.1038/nmat1980

Subject Categories: Nanoscale materials | Surface and thin films | Design synthesis and processing

Surfactant-assisted fabrication of free-standing inorganic sheets covering an array of micrometre-sized holes

Jian Jin1, Yutaka Wakayama2, Xinsheng Peng1 & Izumi Ichinose1


Thin inorganic membranes are of importance to a number of applications such as sensing, catalysis and separation. Here, we present a method to fabricate free-standing sheets of various inorganic materials such as C, Si, Pt, Fe and CdSe with thicknesses ranging from a few to a hundred nanometres. First, an array of holes in a flat substrate was uniformly covered by dried-foam-film (DFF) self-standing reversed bilayers of surfactants. As the surfactant bilayers are sufficiently robust to allow deposition of amorphous films, a variety of inorganic films were then fabricated on the DFFs using physical deposition techniques such as sputtering, electron-beam deposition and thermal deposition. The films thus obtained showed improved thermal stability compared with the DFFs. This fabrication method therefore provides a flexible and reliable way to readily produce free-standing inorganic multilayered structures.

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  1. Organic Nanomaterials Center, National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan
  2. Advanced Electronic Materials Center, National Institute for Materials Science (NIMS), 1-1 Namiki, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-0044, Japan

Correspondence to: Izumi Ichinose1 e-mail: ICHINOSE.Izumi@nims.go.jp

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