Rapid Template-Assisted Self-Assembly: A Practical Route to the Fast Assembly of Colloids

A simple, easy, and quick technique for assembling nanoparticles in topographically designed PDMS molds of nanosized shapes, has great potential in many spectroscopic and sensing tools, paving the way for many applications. Close-packed particle poses rich plasmonic resonances, which enable tailoring the optical response, on both the nano- and the macroscale. Template-assisted self-assembly (TASA) is a method that creates colloi-dal aggregates with controlled sizes formed by dewetting aqueous dispersions of nanopar-ticles across surfaces. We present a modified version in which the overall time of the pro-cess is less than five minutes, namely, rapid TASA (rTASA), which adds speed and user-friendliness compared to capillary force-assisted nanoparticle assembly (CAPA), where the highest precision in particle positioning is ensured with a high cost of time and critical con-trol of the meniscus shape. Depending on the array pitch distance and the average num-ber of particles per trap, the transmission through the template drops between 20 – 80%, which makes their detection possible using even the most simple spectroscopic solutions. This rapid method could be used as a building block to generate self-assembled systems that may exhibit interesting properties in highly valuable areas, especially in building a fast test for nanoparticle detection.