Highly ordered palladium nanodots and nanowires from switchable block copolymer thin films

We demonstrate a new approach to fabricate highly ordered arrays of nanoscopic palladium dots and wires using switchable block copolymer thin films. The surface-reconstructed block copolymer templates were directly deposited with palladium nanoparticles from a simple aqueous solution. The preferential interaction of the nanoparticles with one of the blocks is mainly responsible for the lateral arrangement of the nanoparticles inside the pores of the templates in addition to the capillary forces. A subsequent stabilization by UV-irradiation followed by pyrolysis in air at 450 degrees C removes the polymer to produce highly ordered metallic nanostructures. We extended this approach to micellar films to obtain metallic nanostructures. This method is highly versatile as the procedure used here is simple, eco-friendly and provides a simple approach to fabricate a broad range of nanoscaled architectures with tunable lateral spacing, and can be extended to systems with even smaller dimensions.