Three-Dimensional Crystalline and Homogeneous Metallic Nanostructures Using Directed Assembly of Nanoparticles

Directed assembly of nano building blocks offers a versatile route to the creation of complex nanostructures with unique properties. Bottom-up directed assembly of nanoparticles have been considered as one of the best approaches to fabricate such functional and novel nanostructures. However, there is a dearth of studies on making crystalline, solid, and homogeneous nanostructures. This requires a fundamental understanding of the forces driving the assembly of nanoparticles and precise control of these forces to enable the formation of desired nanostructures. Here, we demonstrate that colloidal nanoparticles can be assembled and simultaneously fused into 3-D solid nanostructures in a single step using externally applied electric field. By understanding the influence of various assembly parameters, we showed the fabrication of 3-D metallic materials with complex geometries such as nanopillars, nanoboxes, and nanorings with feature sizes as small as 25 nm in less than a minute. The fabricated gold nanopillar...