Nanosphere lithography: the effect of chemical etching and annealing sequence on the shape and spectrum of nano-metal arrays

Farzaneh Bayat; Habib Tajalli

doi:10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03382

Nanosphere lithography: the effect of chemical etching and annealing sequence on the shape and spectrum of nano-metal arrays

Heliyon. 2020 Feb 11;6(2):e03382. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e03382. eCollection 2020 Feb.

Authors

Farzaneh Bayat¹, Habib Tajalli^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Physics, Azarbaijan Shahid Madani University, Tabriz, Iran.
² Photonics Group, Research Institute for Applied Physics and Astronomy, University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.
³ Biophotonics Research Center, Islamic Azad University of Tabriz, Tabriz, Iran.

Abstract

In this paper, it is shown that the sequence of chemical etching of the template and annealing has a significant effect on the shape and spectrum of the nano-metal arrays fabricated by nanosphere lithography (NSL). Higher nanoparticles with sharp edges are fabricated as a consequence of annealing the metal coated template, which is a 2d colloidal crystal, before chemical etching. Consequently, the absorption spectra of the fabricated sample become much sharper, in comparison with the one that is fabricated with the reversed order and also a shift is observed in the peak wavelength. The achieved result has practical importance for the applications of these nano-metal arrays in localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) based sensors.

Keywords: Annealing; Chemical etching; Localized surface plasmon resonance; Materials science; Microstructure; Nanomaterials; Nanoparticles; Nanosphere lithography; Nanotechnology; Photonics; Thin film.