Thursday, November 8, 2007 - 10:10 AM
527f

Fabrication of High-Quality Non-Close-Packed 2D Colloid Crystals by Template-Guided Langmuir-Blodgett Particle Deposition

Jaehyun Hur, Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, Forney Hall of Chemical Engineering (FRNY), 480 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907 and You-Yeon Won, School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, 480 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907.

High-quality two-dimensional (2D) colloid crystals have potential utility in many technological applications, for instance, as surface templates for epitaxially growing 3D colloid photonic crystals, as structural elements for modulating the surface plasmon properties of materials, and as mold structures for fabricating microlens. Therefore, precise and economical fabrication of 2D colloid crystals presents essential opportunities for advancement of these technologies. In this talk, we will present a new method of constructing highly-ordered 2D colloid crystals with non-closed-packed symmetries. In this method, using the so-called Langmuir-Blodgett (LB) monolayer deposition technique, we transfer a Langmuir monolayer of colloidal particles constructed at the air-water interface onto a substrate which contains micro-fabricated topological patterns. We demonstrate that by using this template-guided LB deposition method, near perfect single 2D colloid crystal domains of the order of a few hundred micrometers can be easily fabricated under appropriate LB processing conditions. We investigate the effects of various control parameters (such as the initial particle density at the air-water interface, and the substrate lifting speed during the LB particle deposition process) on the density of the deposited particles in the resultant LB monolayer; the final density of the particles deposited on the patterned surface is found to be systematically lower than the particle packing density of the initial Langmuir monolayer, and this dilation is an increasing function of the LB deposition speed. On the length scale of the order of a few hundred micrometers, we observe the formation of stripe patterns in the template-guided LB particle monolayer film, which (we believe for the first time) indicates that the contact line of the water meniscus is not stationary but its position undulates periodically due to the water evaporation during the LB deposition, contrary to what has been commonly assumed in many previous models describing the LB (dip-coating) processes. We present a new theoretical model that takes into account the effects of the evaporation-induced surface flow and the particle concentration gradient around the meniscus contact line.