Fabrication of Non-Close-Packed Arrays of Colloidal Spheres by Soft Lithography

摘要

The ordered non-close-packed (ncp) arrays of nano- and micro-scaled colloidal spheres on solid substrates have attracted extensive interest due to their potential applications in fields,such as optics,photonics,sensing,and surface patterning.Various manipulation techniques based on optical tweezers,microrobot,laser beams,or AFM have been developed to precisely place the spheres one by one at the desired position on a substrate,but the serial processing speed is a limitation to achieve acceptable throughputs.Although templating methods using structure- or property-patterned surfaces are effective in the simultaneous fabrication of a large area of 2D arrays with designable structures,the involved patterning techniques (such as advanced photolithography,focused ion beam lithography,and dip-pen nanolithography) for templating single submicrometer-scaled spheres are usually not accessible to common labs.