Fabrication of asymmetric micro- and nanostructure based on stepwise angle-resolved colloidal lithography

Due to the process simplicity, the low cost, and the accessibility of scaling down the feature size, colloidal lithography has drawn a great deal of attention once being developed. In this work we succeeded in fabricating asymmetric heterogeneous arrays of metallic NPs and asymmetric nanoshells via stepwise angle-resolved colloidal lithography. The present approach is independent of the sphere sizes of colloidal masks and the chemical nature of materials deposited, while it shows a profound dependence on the registry of colloidal masks with respect to the incidence vapor beam and the incidence angle. Such asymmetric heterogeneous arrays and asymmetric nanoshells are hard to construct by otherwise lithographic techniques.