Tyndall National Institute, Lee Maltings, Cork, Ireland.
Adv Mater. 2010 Aug 3;22(29):3104-24. doi: 10.1002/adma.200903708.
The area of colloidal photonic crystal research has attracted enormous attention in recent years as a result of the potential of such materials to provide the means of fabricating new or improved photonic devices. As an area where chemistry still predominates over engineering the field is still in its infancy in terms of finding real applications being limited by ease of fabrication, reproducibility and 'quality'- for example the extent to which ordered structures may be prepared over large areas. It is our contention that the Langmuir-Blodgett assembly method when applied to colloidal particles of silica and perhaps other materials, offers a way of overcoming these issues. To this end the assembly of silica and other particles into colloidal photonic crystals using the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) method is described and some of the numerous papers on this topic, which have been published, are reviewed. It is shown that the layer-by-layer control of photonic crystal growth afforded by the LB method allows for the fabrication of a range of novel, layered photonic crystals that may not be easily assembled using any other approach. Some of the more interesting of these structures, including so-called heterostructured photonic crystals comprising of layers of spheres having different diameters are presented and their optical properties described. Finally, we offer our comments as to future applications of this interesting technology.
近年来，胶体光子晶体研究领域引起了极大的关注，因为这类材料有可能提供制造新型或改进型光子器件的手段。作为一个化学仍占主导地位而非工程的领域，该领域在寻找实际应用方面仍处于起步阶段，受到制造的容易程度、可重复性和“质量”的限制——例如，有序结构在多大程度上可以在大面积上制备。我们认为，当将Langmuir-Blodgett 组装方法应用于二氧化硅和其他可能的材料的胶体颗粒时，提供了一种克服这些问题的方法。为此，描述了使用 Langmuir-Blodgett（LB）方法将二氧化硅和其他颗粒组装成胶体光子晶体，并且综述了一些已经发表的关于该主题的大量论文。结果表明，LB 方法提供的光子晶体生长的逐层控制允许制造一系列新型的层状光子晶体，这些晶体可能不容易使用任何其他方法组装。展示了其中一些更有趣的结构，包括由具有不同直径的球体层组成的所谓的异质结构光子晶体，并描述了它们的光学性质。最后，我们对这项有趣技术的未来应用提出了我们的看法。
