Development and annealing of colloidal multilayer structures of silica microspheres

Colloidal multilayer structures of silica microspheres have been developed on the quartz substrates using vertical deposition technique and effect of annealing on optical properties of samples was investigated using UV–Visible spectroscopy. It is noticed that forbidden photonic band gap is a function of annealing temperatures and annealing times. Morphology of particles was characterized using scanning electron microscope (SEM), transmission electron microscope (TEM) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). SEM and TEM micrographs illustrate the uniform size distribution of silica microspheres with an average size of 280 nm.