Letter abstract
Nature Materials 4, 896 - 900 (2005)
doi:10.1038/nmat1517
Subject Categories: Nanoscale materials | Design synthesis and processing
Spontaneous formation of nanoparticle stripe patterns through dewetting
Jiaxing Huang1,2,3, Franklin Kim1,2,3, Andrea R. Tao1,2,3, Stephen Connor1,2 and Peidong Yang1,2
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.
- Department of Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
- Materials Science Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California 94720, USA
- These authors contributed equally to this work
Correspondence to: Peidong Yang1,2 e-mail: p_yang@berkeley.edu
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