Two-dimensional colloid crystals templated by polyelectrolyte multilayer patterns

In this paper, we demonstrate that two-dimensional (2D) periodic patterns of polyelectrolyte multilayers (PEMs) can be used as surface templates for assembling highly ordered 2D colloidal microarrays. We report detailed structural features of the 2D colloid crystals produced by depositing silica microspheres onto periodic micrometer-scale PEM patterns arrayed in a square or hexagonal lattice with a pattern pitch (approximately) twice the pattern diameter. Analysis of the images of these 2D colloid monolayers reveals that the distributions of the distances by which the adsorbed particles deviate from the corresponding PEM pattern centers are typically bell-shaped, with the majority of the deposited particles located within a relatively short distance from the respective pattern centers. We show that this behavior reflects the effect of the electrostatic focusing force that (occurs because of the finite size of the PEM pattern and) becomes effective when the depositing particle approaches the pattern site to a small distance. Also, in these 2D colloid crystals, the orientations of the off-center displacements of the deposited particles are strongly correlated spatially over the entire sample size. We present experimental evidence that this unusually long-ranged orientational correlation is due to the close spacing of the patterns, which causes an overlap of the excluded volumes between the neighboring deposited particles.