Constrained growth of the PMMA photonic crystals

摘要

The constrained growth was observed during the formation process of the photonic crystals from the monodispersed PMMA colloidal microsphere and a controllable vertical deposition (CVD) technology was developed to prepare the photonic crystal based on these growth behaviors and the PMMA colloid particles with size of 345nm were assembled into the 3-D arrays. The transmittance spectrum of the typical sample exhibited an enlarged transmission mode. Their SEM observation revealed that the bulk structure of the crystalline array had a high periodical and long range order, the perfect order zone was above 20μm and the surface of the crystal was complete flat and had only two vacancies in the 3 × 5 μm order zone. The growth interface analysis indicated that the colloidal spheres sedimented subsequently and the drying front between the suspension and crystal moved at a constant velocity with time. The crystals developed by the continuous growth mechanism and the growing crystals had rough interface during the process of controllable vertical deposition.