Printing nanomaterials in shrinking gels

• Published in: Science (American Association for the Advancement of Science) Vol. 362; no. 6420; pp. 1244 - 1245
• Main Authors: Long, Timothy E, Williams, Christopher B
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States The American Association for the Advancement of Science 14.12.2018
• Subjects: Crosslinking; Dehydration; Fabrication; Free form; Gels; Metamaterials; Nanofabrication; Nanomaterials; Nanoparticles; Nanotechnology; Organic chemistry; Photonics; Plasmonics; Scaffolds
• ISSN: 0036-8075; 1095-9203
• DOI: 10.1126/science.aav5712

Photopatterning of reactive sites in gels enables arbitrary patterning of nanoparticles The creation of nanoscale electronics, photonics, plasmonics, and mechanically robust metamaterials will benefit from nanofabrication processes that allow a designer full control in manipulating nanomaterial precursors in a programmable and volumetric manner. Despite decades of research, it remains challenging to design nanofabrication processes that can produce complex free-form three-dimensional (3D) objects at the scale of tens of nanometers. On page 1281 of this issue, Oran et al. ( 1 ) report on the photopatterning of reactive sites into water-swollen, chemically cross-linked acrylic gels for the subsequent site-specific deposition of nanomaterials and nanoparticles. After chemical and thermal dehydration, the gel scaffold holds the nanomaterials in a distinct 3D arrangement. This process, termed implosion fabrication (ImpFab) because the scaffold of the gel effectively “implodes” upon solvent removal, provides an opportunity to fabricate centimeter-scale assemblies of nanomaterials that possess multiple functionalities.