Nanosphere lithography is an effective technique for high throughput fabrication of well-ordered patterns, but
expanding the method to large area coverage of nanoparticles less than 300 nm in diameter while maintaining good order
has proven challenging. Here we demonstrate a nanosphere lithography based technique for fabricating large area, wellordered
arrays of hemispherical metal particles which pushes the limits of these size constraints. First, large area
monolayers of polystyrene (PS) nanospheres are assembled at an air-water interface and then transferred to a submerged
substrate. The submerged substrate is supported at a 10° angle so that the water draining speed can be used to control the
transfer rate, which is essential for hydrophobic substrates such as the polymer-coated glass used in our work.
A double liftoff procedure was used to transfer the PS pattern to a silver particle array on an arbitrary substrate,
achieving tunable control over the final metal particle diameter and spacing in the range of 50-150 nm and 100-200 nm,
respectively. Additional control over particle shape and diameter can be obtained by modifying the substrate surface
energy. For example, depositing silver on ITO-coated glass rather than a more hydrophilic clean glass substrate leads to
a more hemispherical particle shape and a diameter reduction of 20%. Peak wavelength-selective reflection greater than
70% and total extinction greater than 90% were measured. The intensity, position and bandwidth of the main plasmon
resonance of the arrays were shown to have minimal angle dependence up to at least 30° off normal.
Access to the requested content is limited to institutions that have purchased or subscribe to SPIE eBooks.
You are receiving this notice because your organization may not have SPIE eBooks access.*
*Shibboleth/Open Athens users─please
sign in
to access your institution's subscriptions.
To obtain this item, you may purchase the complete book in print or electronic format on
SPIE.org.
INSTITUTIONAL Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.
PERSONAL Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.