Nanosphere lithography using thermal evaporation of gold

Nanosphere lithography, which allows for the fabrication of patterned metal surfaces, is a simple, effective and unconventional technique that exploits a self-assembly process. Using this technique, polystyrene nanospheres with diameters of 500nm, and 1 mu m were assembled onto a 'muscovite' mica substrate in a hexagonally close packed monolayer array, to provide a physical mask for material deposition. Thermal evaporation was subsequently used to deposit gold through the nanosphere mask layer, to generate a periodic array of gold nanostructures. Upon changing the mask to a multilayered array of nanospheres, slightly more complex nanostructures were achieved. However due to thermal evaporation being a high temperature process the nanostructures obtained deviated from their predicted quasi triangular shape due to a slight annealing of the polystyrene mask.