Printing nanoparticle building blocks from the gas phase using nanoxerography

Abstract

This letter reports on the electrostatic driven self-assembly of nanoparticles onto charged surface areas (receptors) from the gas phase for nanoparticle based device fabrication. The charged areas were generated by a parallel technique that uses a flexible, conductive electrode to pattern electrons and holes in a thin film electret. Samples, 1 cm2 in size, were patterned with charge in 10 s with 100 nm scale resolution. Charge based receptors, 100 nm×100 nm in size, contained ∼100 elementary charges. A transparent particle assembly module was designed to direct and monitor the assembly of metallic nanoparticles at a resolution of 100 nm, which is ∼3 orders of magnitude greater than the resolution of existing xerographic printers.