Inward-Growing Self-Assembly of Colloidal Crystal Films on Horizontal Substrates

Citations Over TimeTop 10% of 2005 papers

Abstract

Colloidal crystal films have been fabricated on solid substrates with a horizontal deposition method. Scanning electron microscope images showed that the colloidal crystal films exhibit ordered face-centered cubic structures in large domains. Optical measurements demonstrated the presence of photonic band gap along the crystallographic [111] direction. The fabrication method described in this paper allows one to rapidly fabricate colloidal crystal films of different thicknesses, which can be controlled by varying colloidal suspension concentration or volume. In addition, the method also works well for growing colloidal crystal films on a hydrophilic solid substrate with a rough surface. Furthermore, the fabrication of colloidal crystal heterostructures has been demonstrated. An inward-growing mechanism responsible for self-assembly of colloidal spheres on horizontal substrates has been proposed to interpret the observed experimental results.

Related Papers

• → A New Synthetic Approach to Silicon Colloidal Photonic Crystals with a Novel Topology and an Omni‐Directional Photonic Bandgap: Micromolding in Inverse Silica Opal (MISO)(2003)62 cited
• → Optical properties of tetragonal photonic crystal synthesized via template-assisted self-assembly(2006)23 cited
• → Hybrid colloidal crystal for photonic application(2011)1 cited
• → Effect of defect states on photonic dispersion in colloidal crystals(2003)
• → Graded-index colloidal photonic crystals and their versatile photonic applications(2004)