Fully Tunable Silicon Nanowire Arrays Fabricated by Soft Nanoparticle Templating
The fabrication of tunable silicon nanowire arrays over large areas has so far remained so far an elusive task. A team lead by Prof. Lucio Isa from the Laboratory of Interfaces, Soft Matter and Assembly has demonstrated that current limitations can be overcome by a novel fabrication approach exploiting the self-assembly of soft hydrogel nanoparticles at fluid interfaces.
Nanoparticle monolayers at oil-water interfaces can be continuously compressed and transferred to silicon substrates, where they act as tunable masks for the fabrication of silicon nanowire arrays via wet etching. The resulting nanostructured materials exhibit intriguing optical properties, including tunable structural colors ranging over the whole visible range on a single substrate.