Large-Area Well-Ordered Nanodot Array Pattern Fabricated With Self-Assembled Nanosphere Template

This paper has demonstrated a simple method to fabricate a large-area (~1 cm²) well-ordered gold nanodot array pattern with high throughput at low cost. At first, self-assembled polystyrene (PS) spheres are closely packed on a water surface, and then transferred from the water surface to a solid substrate by dip coating. This results in a large-area defect-free close-packed PS sphere monolayer template on the solid substrate. It is worthy noting that the large-area close-packed PS sphere template can be transferred to the surfaces of various solids including silicon, oxides and metals, offering great flexibility. Furthermore, the close-packed PS monolayer can be tailored to a loose-packed sphere array template by reactive ion etching (RIE) technique. The sphere size is reduced upon etching but the spacing between spheres retains unchanged. By utilizing the PS sphere template, gold nanodot arrays with feature size down to 30 nm have been fabricated.