The Relationship between Growth Speed and Ambient Humidity in Convective Self-assembly

We present a variation of a standard convective self-assembly technique, where the drying meniscus is restricted by a straight-edge located approximately 100 μm above the substrate adjacent to the drying zone. We find this technique to yield films at roughly twice the growth rate compared to the standard technique. We attribute this to differing local evaporation rates in the two cases. We also investigate how the crystal growth rate depends on ambient relative humidity and find a clear linear dependency, which we attribute to the length of the drying zone being constant over a wide range of humidities.