Organized self-assembly of Au nanoparticles at the air/water interface

Bottom-up fabrication attracts increasing interest as a viable and powerful means for construction of organized nanostructures. We have developed innovative bottom-up approaches for creating two-dimensional metal nanoparticle (NP) structures at the air/water interface. The techniques are based upon self-assembly of metal NPs within surfactant monolayer templates deposited on water. The surfactants in these systems essentially constrain the NPs to specific configurations at the air/water interface. Through modulation of the surfactant monolayer compositions we can fabricate diverse patterns of the NPs both at the nanoscale and microscale. Importantly, the metal nanostructures can be successfully transferred onto solid transparent surfaces, and can be further employed for construction of transparent conductive electrodes (TCEs) for possible electro-optics applications.