Metal deposition deep into microstructure by electroless plating

It is generally difficult to deposit metal on an occluded part of a structure or inside a long tubular structure. In this paper, we report an electroless plating method that is useful for metal deposition onto internal obscured regions of a complex structure, and we show that the technique can deposit metal over a wide area. We demonstrate gold deposition inside a capillary tube and a complex concave structure of micrometer scale consisting of polystyrene microbeads sandwiched between glass plates.