Improving self-assembly quality of colloidal crystal guided by statistical design of experiments

【摘要】 A versatile and reliable approach is created to fabricate wafer-scale colloidal crystal that consists of a monolayer of hexagonally close-packed polystyrene(PS) spheres. Making wafer-scale colloidal crystal is usually challenging, and it lacks a general theoretical guidance for experimental approaches. To obtain the optimal conditions for self-assembly, a systematic statistical design and analysis method is utilized here, which applies the pick-the-winner rule. This new method combines spin-coating and thermal treatment, and introduces a mixture of glycol and ethanol as a dispersion system to assist self-assembly. By controlling the parameters of self-assembly, we improve the quality of colloidal crystal and reduce the effect of noise on the experiment. To our best knowledge, we are first to pave this path to harvest colloidal crystals.Importantly, a theoretical analysis using an energy landscape base on our process is also developed to provide insights into the PS spheres’ self-assembly.更多还原

【Abstract】 A versatile and reliable approach is created to fabricate wafer-scale colloidal crystal that consists of a monolayer of hexagonally close-packed polystyrene(PS) spheres. Making wafer-scale colloidal crystal is usually challenging, and it lacks a general theoretical guidance for experimental approaches. To obtain the optimal conditions for self-assembly, a systematic statistical design and analysis method is utilized here, which applies the pick-the-winner rule. This new method combines spin-coating and thermal treatment, and introduces a mixture of glycol and ethanol as a dispersion system to assist self-assembly. By controlling the parameters of self-assembly, we improve the quality of colloidal crystal and reduce the effect of noise on the experiment. To our best knowledge, we are first to pave this path to harvest colloidal crystals.Importantly, a theoretical analysis using an energy landscape base on our process is also developed to provide insights into the PS spheres’ self-assembly.更多还原