Continuous Convective Assembling of Fine Particles into Two-Dimensional Arrays on Solid Surfaces

Abstract

Forming regular textures of an arbitrary size on smooth solid surfaces is the challenge of future technology to produce new types of optical gratings, optical filters, antireflective surface coatings, selective solar absorbers, data storage, and microelectronics. Here we present a novel approach to form such sophisticated textures: controlling the growth of particle arrays on smooth and wettable solid surfaces. The obtained centimeter-size polycrystalline monolayer films consist of closely packed fine particles. Coloring of the monolayer which arises from the light diffraction, interference, and scattering exclusively inherent in textured films shows the size of the differently oriented crystal domains building the film. The results show that the higher the particle monodispersity, the lower the particle volume fraction, and the higher the environmental humidity, the larger the size of the forming domains.