New Colloidal Lithographic Nanopatterns Fabricated by Combining Pre-Heating and Reactive Ion Etching

We report a low-cost and simple method for fabrication of nonspherical colloidal lithographic nanopatterns with a long-range order by preheating and oxygen reactive ion etching of monolayer and double-layer polystyrene spheres. This strategy allows excellent control of size and morphology of the colloidal particles and expands the applications of the colloidal patterns as templates for preparing ordered functional nanostructure arrays. For the first time, various unique nanostructures with long-range order, including network structures with tunable neck length and width, hexagonal-shaped, and rectangular-shaped arrays as well as size tunable nanohole arrays, were fabricated by this route. Promising potentials of such unique periodic nanostructures in various fields, such as photonic crystals, catalysts, templates for deposition, and masks for etching, are naturally expected.