Large-scale fabrication of highly ordered sub-20 nm noble metal nanoparticles on silica substrates without metallic adhesion layers

Periodic noble metal nanoparticles offer a wide spectrum of applications including chemical and biological sensors,optical devices,and model catalysts due to their extraordinary properties.For sensing purposes and catalytic studies,substrates made of glass or fused-silica are normally required as supports,without the use of metallic adhesion layers.However,precise patterning of such uniform arrays of silica-supported noble metal nanoparticles,especially at sub-100 nm in diameter,is challenging without adhesion layers.In this paper,we report a robust method to large-scale fabricate highly ordered sub-20 nm noble metal nanoparticles,i.e.,gold and platinum,supported on silica substrates without adhesion layers,combining displacement Talbot lithography(DTL)with dry-etching techniques.Periodic photoresist nanocolumns at diameters of~110 nm are patterned on metal-coated oxidized silicon wafers using DTL,and subsequently transferred at a 1:1 ratio into anti-reflection layer coating(BARC)nanocolumns with the formation of nano-sharp tips,using nitrogen plasma etching.These BARC nanocolumns are then used as a mask for etching the deposited metal layer using inclined argon ion-beam etching.We find that increasing the etching time results in coneshaped silica features with metal nanoparticles on the tips at diameters ranging from 100 nm to sub-30 nm,over large areas of 3×3 cm^(2).Moreover,subsequent annealing these sub-30 nm metal nanoparticle arrays at high-temperature results in sub-20 nm metal nanoparticle arrays with~10^(10) uniform particles.

Modular operation of microfluidic chips for highly parallelized cell culture and liquid dosing via a fluidic circuit board

Microfluidic systems enable automated and highly parallelized cell culture with low volumes and defined liquid dosing.To achieve this,systems typically integrate all functions into a single,monolithic device as a“one size fits all”solution.However,this approach limits the end users’(re)design flexibility and complicates the addition of new functions to the system.To address this challenge,we propose and demonstrate a modular and standardized plug-and-play fluidic circuit board(FCB)for operating microfluidic building blocks(MFBBs),whereby both the FCB and the MFBBs contain integrated valves.A single FCB can parallelize up to three MFBBs of the same design or operate MFBBs with entirely different architectures.The operation of the MFBBs through the FCB is fully automated and does not incur the cost of an extra external footprint.We use this modular platform to control three microfluidic large-scale integration(mLSI)MFBBs,each of which features 64 microchambers suitable for cell culturing with high spatiotemporal control.We show as a proof of principle that we can culture human umbilical vein endothelial cells(HUVECs)for multiple days in the chambers of this MFBB.Moreover,we also use the same FCB to control an MFBB for liquid dosing with a high dynamic range.Our results demonstrate that MFBBs with different designs can be controlled and combined on a single FCB.Our novel modular approach to operating an automated microfluidic system for parallelized cell culture will enable greater experimental flexibility and facilitate the cooperation of different chips from different labs.