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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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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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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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat1517
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