Evaporation-induced self-assembly of colloidal particles is one of the most versatile fabrication routes to obtain large-area colloidal crystals; however, the formation of uncontrolled “drying cracks” due to gradual solvent evaporation represents a significant challenge of this process. While several methods are reported to minimize crack formation during evaporation-induced colloidal assembly, here an approach is reported to take advantage of the crack formation as a patterning tool to fabricate microscopic photonic structures with controlled sizes and geometries. This is achieved through a mechanistic understanding of the fracture behavior of three different types of opal structures, namely, direct opals (colloidal crystals with no matrix material), compound opals (colloidal crystals with matrix material), and inverse opals (matrix material templated by a sacrificial colloidal crystal). This work explains why, while direct and inverse opals tend to fracture along the expected {111} planes, the compound opals exhibit a different cracking behavior along the nonclose-packed {110} planes, which is facilitated by the formation of cleavage-like fracture surfaces. The discovered principles are utilized to fabricate photonic microbricks by programming the crack initiation at specific locations and by guiding propagation along predefined orientations during the self-assembly process, resulting in photonic microbricks with controlled sizes and geometries.
Colloidal co-assembly
Nanoporous architectures use periodic arrays of hollow spaces to generate the intense structural colors of butterflies, beetles, and birds, enhance the mechanical stability of bones, and facilitate gas exchange through egg shells. Analogous synthetic periodic nanoporous structures, known as inverse opals, offer a compelling materials strategy for use in optics as well as in fields ranging from catalysis and energy storage to tissue engineering. While inverse opals and other 3D photonic structures can be produced by top-down processes, a much simpler, lower cost approach to generating uniform pore size and order is to use self-assembling colloidal spheres to construct a patterned, periodic colloidal crystal, or opal, which then acts as a sacrificial template for self-assembling the porous structure. However, this technique has been plagued by uncontrolled crack and defect formation over the length scales required for most applications. We have discovered that taking a simpler approach - letting colloids and a silicate sol-gel precursor co-assemble in one step rather than sequentially – generates highly ordered, crack-free, multilayered inverse opal films on the scale of centimeters.
We are currently investigating the mechanism behind this long-range order; co-assembly not only avoids the cracking and inhomogeneities associated with liquid infiltration into a preassembled opal but also appears to take advantage of an interplay between the assembling template and matrix that leads to correction of incipient defects. The versatility of this approach enables us to fabricate hierarchical structures not achievable by conventional methods, such as introducing condensation-induced anisotropy.
Publications
Media Coverage
The dynamics of evaporative patterning, Harvard press release, October 6, 2015.
Controlling Evaporative Patterning Transitions, American Institute of Physics, September 29, 2015.