Electrochemical Fabrication of Inverse Opal Silicon Structures

In recent years electrodeposition from ionic liquids has become an extremely active area of research. Many authors have utilised their stability over a wide potential range to deposit materials which would be unstable in conventional aqueous or non aqueous systems. Silicon electrodeposition is one such case which has recently seen a growing level of interest.(1-3) Silicon has a large number of applications in the electronic and optoelectronic (including a need of inverse opal silicon structures) industry (4) and as such a reliable electrodeposition technique may prove to be extremely useful. Inverse opal structures of gold and other materials have been prepared via templated electrodeposition for several years. (5) This work seeks to develop this methodology to prepare silicon inverse opal structures.