Preparation of High-Quality
Colloidal Mask for Nanosphere
Lithography by a Combination of Air/Water Interface Self-Assembly
and Solvent Vapor Annealing
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Abstract
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