Hierarchic mesoscopic patterns

Hierarchic Mesoscopic Patterns of Dye Aggregates in Self-Organized Dewetted Films... 

Aksay and coworkers [20] produced mesoscopic patterning of oriented nan-ostructured silica thin films polymerized by a surfactant-templated sol-gel technique [21] in combination with a micromolding technique, which is another microfabrication technique without photolithography proposed by Xia and Whitesides [19]. A network pattern of microcapillaries (submicrometer scale) was transferred to an elastomeric PDMS stamp as a microreplica molding. An aqueous mixture of tetraethoxysilane and a cationic surfactant (CTAC cetyltri-methylammonium chloride) was introduced into the microcapillaries. After hydrolysis of tetraethoxysilane at the cationic interface of the tubular surfactant assemblies, a mesoscopic supramolecular structure hierarchically constituted from hexagonally packed nanoscopic tubules of silica was formed in the microscopic capillary. 

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