Fabrication of Wafer-scale Polystyrene (2+1) Dimensional Photonic Crystal Multilayers Via the Layer-by-layer Scooping Transfer Technique

We have developed a simple synthetic method for fabricating a wafer-scale colloidal crystal film of 2D crystals in a 1D stack based on a combination of two simple processes : the self-assembly of polystyrene (PS) nanospheres at the water-air interface and the layer-by-layer (LbL) scooping transfer technique. The main advantage of this approach is that it allows excellent control of the thickness (at a layer level) of the crystals and the formation of a vertical crack-free layer over a wafer-scale (4 inch). We investigate the optical and morphological properties of the PhC multilayers fabricated using various mono-sized colloidal crystals (250, 300, 350, 420, 580, 720, and 850 nm), and mixed binary colloidal crystals (300/350 and 250/350 nm).