Fabrication of Functional Polymer Structures through Bottom-Up Selective Vapor Deposition from Bottom-Up Conductive Templates

• Published in: Langmuir Vol. 34; no. 15; pp. 4651 - 4657
• Main Authors: Wu, Chih-Yu, Hsieh, Hung-Pin, Chen, Shih-Ting, Liu, Ting-Yu, Chen, Hsien-Yeh
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 17.04.2018
• ISSN: 0743-7463; 1520-5827
• DOI: 10.1021/acs.langmuir.7b04008

An electrically induced bottom-up process was introduced for the fabrication of multifunctional nanostructures of polymers. Without requiring complicated photolithography or printing techniques, the fabrication process first produced a conducting template by colloidal lithography to create an interconnected conduction pathway. By supplying an electrical charge to the conducting network, the conducting areas were enabled with a highly energized surface that generally deactivated the adsorbed reactive species and inhibited the vapor deposition of poly-p-xylylene polymers. However, the template allowed the deposition of ordered poly-p-xylylene nanostructures only on the confined and negative areas of the conducting template, in a relatively large centimeter-scale production. The wide selection of functionality and multifunctional capability of poly-p-xylylenes naturally rendered the synergistic and orthogonal chemical reactivity of the resulting nanostructures. With only a few steps, the construction of a nanometer topology with the functionalization of multiple chemical conducts can be achieved, and the selected deposition process represents a state-of-the-art nanostructure fabrication in a simple and versatile approach from the bottom up.