Chemical patterns of octadecyltrimethoxysilane monolayers for the selective deposition of nanoparticles on silicon substrate.

The use of nano-objects to make the active part of reproducible nanodevices requires their controlled assembling on specific areas of substrates. In this work, we propose to use van der Waals interactions to assemble selectively gold particles covered by alkyl-thiol ligands on hydrophobic OctadecylTriMethoxySilane (OTMS) patterns defined on SiO(2)/Si substrates by a process combining nano-imprint lithography (NIL) or high resolution electron beam lithography (HREBL) and atmospheric chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of silane. A study by atomic force microscopy (AFM) reveals that homogeneous patterns of OTMS self-assembled monolayers, extending on several square millimeters, have been made. These OTMS patterns, with a lateral dimension ranging from 2mum down to 50nm, can be located at a precise place of a nanodevice, for example, between nanoelectrodes. Preliminary results of selective nanoparticle deposition on these chemical patterns are presented.