Large area porous gold films deposited by evaporation-induced colloidal crystal growth

Films that are nanostructured in two- or three-dimensions, such as porous ones, are made by several methods including templated growth and self-assembly. Here, we report on a new method that is based on evaporation-induced growth of nanoparticle gold films on a water surface. The film growth was done in a similar way to the well-known evaporation-induced colloidal crystal growth method, but in contrast, we did not directly deposit the film on a solid substrate. The films were instead created on top of a water surface. After the growth process, the films were deposited directly on substrates by a simple pick-up procedure. The deposited porous gold films were uniform with a thickness of 100 nm and had a sheet resistance of 100 Omega/sq. There are several advantages with our method, including simplicity of the protocol, large film area, flexibility in the choice of substrate to be coated. and the ability for multilayer coatings. The latter points to opportunities for fabrication of multilayer 3D porous structure, which may have wide applications in sensors and electrochemical determinations. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.