Colloidal lithography - The art of nanochemical patterning

Colloidal lithography relies on using colloidal crystals as masks for etching and deposition, and allows fabrication of various nanostructures on planar and nonplanar substrates with low-cost, high-throughput-processing, large fabrication area, and a broad choice of materials. The feature size can easily shrink by decreasing the microsphere diameter in the colloidal mask. The feature shape can be diversified by varying the crystal structure of the colloidal mask, etching the mask, altering the incidence angle of the vapor beam, and stepwise mamipulation of the mask registry. This nanochemical patterning strategy paves a complementary way to conventional top-down lithography. This focus review provides an overview of the principle of colloidal lithography, and surveys the recent developments as well as outlining the future challenges.