Department of Chemistry, State Key Laboratory of New Ceramics and Fine Processing, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Langmuir. 2012 Aug 28;28(34):12681-9. doi: 10.1021/la3026182. Epub 2012 Aug 15.
Nanosphere lithography (NSL) has been regarded as an inexpensive, inherently parallel, high-throughput, materials-general approach to the fabrication of nanoparticle arrays. However, the order of the resulting nanoparticle array is essentially dependent on the quality of the colloidal monolayer mask. Furthermore, the lateral feature size of the nanoparticles created using NSL is coupled with the diameter of the colloidal spheres, which makes it inconvenient for studying the size-dependent properties of nanoparticles. In this work, we demonstrate a facile approach to the fabrication of a large-area, transferrable, high-quality latex colloidal mask for nanosphere lithography. The approach is based on a combination of the air/water interface self-assembly method and the solvent-vapor-annealing technique. It enables the fabrication of colloidal masks with a higher crystalline integrity compared to those produced by other strategies. By manipulating the diameter of the colloidal spheres and precisely tuning the solvent-vapor-annealing process, flexible control of the size, shape, and spacing of the interstice in a colloidal mask can be realized, which may facilitate the broad use of NSL in studying the size-, shape-, and period-dependent optical, magnetic, electronic, and catalytic properties of nanomaterials.
纳米球光刻（NSL）被认为是一种廉价、固有并行、高通量、材料通用的方法，用于制造纳米粒子阵列。然而，所得到的纳米粒子阵列的顺序本质上取决于胶体单层掩模的质量。此外，使用 NSL 制造的纳米粒子的横向特征尺寸与胶体球的直径相关联，这使得研究纳米粒子的尺寸相关性质不方便。在这项工作中，我们展示了一种用于纳米球光刻的大面积、可转移、高质量的乳胶胶体掩模的简单方法。该方法基于气/水界面自组装方法和溶剂蒸气退火技术的结合。它能够制造出具有比其他策略更高结晶完整性的胶体掩模。通过操纵胶体球的直径并精确调整溶剂蒸气退火过程，可以灵活控制胶体掩模中间隙的大小、形状和间距，这可能有助于广泛使用 NSL 来研究纳米材料的尺寸、形状和周期相关的光学、磁性、电子和催化性质。
