Assemble nanospheres on silicon wafer surface

• Main Author: Ye, Xiao Long
• Other Authors: Li Hong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2019
• Subjects: Engineering::Mechanical engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/78724
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nanotechnology and nanoparticles have emerged as an important tool towards improving engineering fabrication and applications. One of nanosphere which so called polystyrene (PS) spheres can be formed into the colloidal crystal monolayer, that through self-assembly of template-assisted synthesis technique. As compared to other type of templates, PS-sphere monolayers not just easily formed but also be adjusted on substrates, which can be further manipulated by using subsequent growth methods. PS sphere colloidal crystals by self-assembly method have been widely used as an effective method to fabricate the one-dimensional nanostructured arrays because it has several outstanding advantages. First, this method can be formed and achieved a relatively large area (cm^2) with a low process and equipment cost. Under capillary forces arising from solvent evaporation, PS spheres (relatively light weight) can be readily self-assembled to single layers and multilayers with the hexagonal close pack (hcp) array. Second, PS spheres provide multi-scale and flexible tuning parameters. Not only the selection of a sphere size, PS spheres can be further tailored through many methods, such as annealing-induced deformation and plasma etching-driven non-closed packing which are not an emphasis in this report. Moreover, these one-dimensional nanostructure arrays can be further adjusted through the combination of colloidal crystal and subsequent growth methods, such as metal-catalytic chemical vapor deposition (CVD) growth, wet or dry etching, solution growth, on-sphere deposition, and oblique angle deposition.