AI Article Synopsis

  • - The traditional methods for making colloidal crystals struggle to achieve the necessary conditions of uniform thickness, 3D ordering, and large defect-free areas, which are essential for creating photonic structures with tunable properties.
  • - A new approach using the Langmuir-Blodgett process and spin-coating has been developed, enabling the formation of high-quality 3D colloidal crystals with minimal defects.
  • - This innovative technique resulted in polystyrene colloidal crystals that covered about 96.5% of the substrate and showed strong 3D ordering, as evidenced by specific optical properties related to Bragg diffraction.

Article Abstract

Traditional approaches to creating colloidal crystals do not simultaneously achieve uniform thickness, three-dimensional ordering, and large areas of defect-free hexagonal close-packed domains. Only the realization of all these conditions will allow the use of colloidal crystals as templates for fabricating inverse opals with a tunable photonic band gap. Therefore, we propose a novel approach for creating 3D colloidal crystals. It combines the use of the Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) process to form the first layer and sequential spin-coating processes to form all following layers. The original automated LB trough, equipped with a feedback control system for surface pressure control, allowed the formation of a close-packed monolayer across the entire area of a 76 mm substrate, obtaining a defect-free domain area of 3000 μm. As a result of the developed spin-coating technique, bilayer and three-layer colloidal crystals based on polystyrene spheres (1.25 and 1.8 μm) were obtained. Three-dimensional HCP structure covered ≈96.5% of the substrate, and a defect-free domain area was obtained at least 1000 μm. The high degree of 3D ordering was confirmed by the presence of stop bands in the transmission spectra at wavelengths corresponding to Bragg diffraction from parallel planes and a 2D array of spherical particles.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/acs.jpcb.4c06234DOI Listing

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