Deposition of materials

Abstract

The method utilizes a conducting trench base with non-conducting trench walls to corral charged particles precisely into the trenches. The nanoparticles are close packed in the channels and highly ordered. This approach utilizes the charge on the particles to selectively deposit them within the trenches, as all nanoparticles in solution can be charged, and this can be extended to any nanoparticle system beyond gold. Also, this method results in the layer-by-layer growth of the gold nanoparticles. Therefore the depth of the nanoparticle layers within the trenches is controllable. This allows the possibility of heterolayered structures of different nanoparticle layers. Further this method ensures that assembly occurs to fill the void space available provided the back-contacting electrode is more conducting than the trench walls. This allows nanoparticle assemblies to be corralled into any lithographically defined shape, which makes this approach highly adaptable to a range of applications.