Evolution of Interparticle Capillary Forces during Drying of Colloidal Crystals

Citations Over TimeTop 17% of 2006 papers

Abstract

Photonic crystals are periodic structures that have the capability to manipulate the photons in the same way as semiconductors do for electrons. The self-assembly strategy that utilizes colloidal crystals as a template to form photonic crystals has received a great deal of recent research interest because it is simple and cost-effective. Experimental studies and theoretical analysis have speculated that capillary forces play a pivotal role in forming the colloidal crystals during the crystal growth process and that particularly during the drying stage the changing of the magnitude of capillary forces is critical to the resultant microstructure. This paper presents a computational analysis of the changing capillary forces, which may throw light on a refined strategy for controlling colloidal crystal growth.

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
• → Efficient Simulations of Charged Colloidal Dispersions: A Density Functional Approach(2005)17 cited
• → Novel device structures based on colloidal photonic crystals(2002)1 cited
• → Graded-index colloidal photonic crystals and their versatile photonic applications(2004)