Metallic Nanomeshes Fabricated by Multimechanism Directed Self-Assembly
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Updated: Oct 17, 2025

A Method to Fabricate Disconnected Silver Nanostructures in 3D
Published on: November 27, 2012
Runze Liu1, Hejin Huang1, Zehao Sun1
1Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139, United States.
Abstract:
The directed self-assembly of block copolymers (BCPs) is a powerful motif for the continued scaling of feature sizes for nanoscale devices. A multimechanism directed self-assembly (MMDSA) method is described that generates orthogonal meshes from a polystyrene-b-poly-2-vinylpyridine BCP that is subsequently metallized with Pt. The MMDSA process takes advantage of three different mechanisms, trench wall guidance, edge nucleation, and underlayer guidance, to align the mesh with respect to substrate features. The mechanisms and their interactions are investigated via both experiments and dissipative particle dynamics simulations. MMDSA is applied to produce well-aligned conductive nanomeshes and then is extended to fabricate multicomponent metallic structures with 2D/3D hybrid morphologies.

