Extra Surfactant-Assisted Self-Assembly of Highly Ordered Monolayers of BaTiO3 Nanocubes at the Air—Water Interface

Abstract

Assembly of nanocrystals into ordered two- or three-dimensional arrays is an essential technology to achieve their application in novel functional devices. Among a variety of assembly techniques, evaporation-induced self-assembly (EISA) is one of the prospective approaches because of its simplicity. Although EISA has shown its potential to form highly ordered nanocrystal arrays, the formation of uniform nanocrystal arrays over large areas remains a challenging subject. Here, we introduce a new EISA method and demonstrate the formation of large-scale highly ordered monolayers of barium titanate (BaTiO3, BT) nanocubes at the air-water interface. In our method, the addition of an extra surfactant to a water surface assists the EISA of BT nanocubes with a size of 15–20 nm into a highly ordered arrangement. We reveal that the compression pressure exerted by the extra surfactant on BT nanocubes during the solvent evaporation is a key factor in the self-assembly in our method. The BT nanocube monolayers transferred to substrates have sizes up to the millimeter scale and a high out-of-plane crystal orientation, containing almost no microcracks and voids.