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Updated: Apr 29, 2026

On-Chip Crystallization and Large-Scale Serial Diffraction at Room Temperature
Published on: March 11, 2022
Structural characterization of colloidal crystals and inverse opals using transmission X-ray microscopy
Bo-Han Huang1, Chun-Chieh Wang2, Chen-Hong Liao3
1Graduate Program for Science and Technology of Accelerator Light Source, National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan, ROC.
Abstract:
A nondestructive tomographic technique was used to determine the crystallographic information of colloidal crystals comprising of polystyrene (PS) microspheres, as well as their silver inverse opals. The properties of the colloidal crystals, such as defects, grain size, grain boundaries, stacking sequence, and grain orientation, were determined using the full field transmission X-ray microscopy (TXM) with a spatial resolution of 50 nm. The PS microspheres (500-750 nm) which underwent a vertical electrophoresis process to form a face-centered cubic (fcc) close-packed structure with an ABCABC packing sequence. In addition, the colloidal crystal exhibited multiple grains, and an orientation variation of 6.1° in the stacking direction between two neighboring grains.
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