Monolayer of silica nanospheres assembled onto ITO-coated glass substrates by spin-coating

Abstract

In this work, we synthesized colloidal silica nanospheres with an average size of 400 nm through the modified Stöber method and successfully fabricated an ordered close-packed silica nanosphere monolayer onto ITO-coated glass substrates using a three-step spin-coating method. ITO films showed resistivity comparable to that of commercial ITO and the silica nanosphere monolayer-coated ITO/glass substrate exhibited good optical transmittance in the visible (550 nm) and near-infrared (900 nm) regions of 62% and 82%, respectively. The results suggest that this monolayer can be used in optoelectronic devices to enhance efficiency in photovoltaic cells.

Spin Coating of Silica Nanocolloids on Mica: Self-Assembly of Two-Dimensional Colloid Crystal Structures and Thin Films

“…Nanocolloidal assembly, in particular (also called nanosphere lithography [15]), holds great promise for the bottom-up fabrication of periodic nanostructures [4,5]. Applications include catalysis [16], optoelectronics [17], surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) templates [18], photonics [19,20], photovoltaics [21], chemical sensors [22], biosensors [23], superhydrophobic surfaces [24], self-cleaning coatings [25], drug and gene delivery [26].…”

“…Although these processes are suitable for laboratory-scale production, they are less useful for industrial processes due to the time scales and tedious fabrication processes involved. Past studies have demonstrated that the spin-coating process provides a simple and efficient method for the dispersion of small particles onto a substrate [16,17,[45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53].…”