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

• 来源期刊: 中国物理B（英文版）
• 关键词: self-assembly colloidal crystal polystyrene spheres statistical design
• 年，卷（期）: 2017,（3）
• 页码范围: 564-568
• 页数: 5页
• 语种: 英文
• DOI: 10.1088/1674-1056/26/3/038105

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.