I am using homemade polystyrene beads (dia 300 nm) for nano-sphere lithography. However I am not able get a large defect free area (more than 10 sq um). I am targeting to get an area around 150 um X 150 um. Can someone suggest the possible methods to achieve this?
What method are you using at the moment? Normally a Langmuir-Blodgett trough is used for this kind of homogeneous deposition of PS spheres.
I tried Drop coating, spin coating and Langmuir-Blodgett methods.
I dipped hydrophillic glass substrate vertically in Polystyrene+Methanol solution and left for few days to dry.
I also tried mixing Triton-X too.
Also, I could not optimize the concentration of polystyrene as it is a home made solution.
The best method of large area defect-free HCP nanosphere pattern that I tried is LB method. You firstly make the polystyrene nanospheres float on the water, shake them gently to let them close pack, and wait until the water airdry. I have obtained centimeter scale area of 1-micron PS spheres using this method. The area also depends on the size of the spheres.
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