Colloidal lithography construction and application of nanostructured surfaces

Combining "top-down" patterning with "bottom-up" self-assembly as template colloidal lithography provides a unique patterning strategy. Spontaneous formation of well-ordered colloidal arrays provides lithographic masks or scaffolds for creating useful patterns. Based on self-assembly of colloidal spheres as template, the controlled "positive" deposition of nanoparticles and "negative" etching processes could be used for the fabrication of nanostructured materials, ranging from several tens of nanometers to micrometer scales for 2D and 3D ordered architectures. The feature size can easily shrink below 100 nm by reducing the diameter of the microspheres used according to the simple correlation between the interstice size and the sphere diameter. The feature shape can be easily diversified by the crystalline structure of a colloidal crystal mask, the time of anisotropic etching of the mask, the incidence angle of the vapor beam and the mask registry. Colloidal lithography provides a complementary tool for conventional and fully "top-down" lithographic techniques, and thus holds immense promise in surface patterning. They show versatility applications such as biosensors or chemosensors using for detection tool. Colloidal lithography is also suitable for modifying surface properties which is useful for emerging applications in biotechnology and chemically and structurally designed interactive sites for the attachment.