Fabrication of Functional Polymer Structures through Bottom-Up Selective Vapor Deposition from Bottom-Up Conductive Templates.

An electrically induced bottom-up process was introduced for the fabrication of multifunctional nanostructures of polymers. Without requiring complicated photolithography or printing techniques, the fabrication process first produced a conducting template by colloidal lithography to create an interconnected conduction pathway. By supplying an electrical charge to the conducting network, the conducting areas were enabled with a highly energized surface that generally deactivated the adsorbed reactive species and inhibited the vapor deposition of poly- p-xylylene polymers. However, the template allowed the deposition of ordered poly- p-xylylene nanostructures only on the confined and negative areas of the conducting template, in a relatively large centimeter-scale production. The wide selection of functionality and multifunctional capability of poly- p-xylylenes naturally rendered the synergistic and orthogonal chemical reactivity of the resulting nanostructures. With only a few steps, the construction of a nanometer topology with the functionalization of multiple chemical conducts can be achieved, and the selected deposition process represents a state-of-the-art nanostructure fabrication in a simple and versatile approach from the bottom up.