The rapid and controllable fabrication of large-scale and highly ordered micro-honeycomb arrays induced by nonsolvent phase separation

Abstract

Structures that are highly ordered in nature show unique light propagation abilities. Among them, micro-honeycomb arrays are attractive owing to their advantages relating to the collection of light or enlarging the viewing angle and, also, owing to their potential applications in precision optics. Inspired by the natural phenomenon of droplet condensation on a cold surface, breath figure self-assembly has been a common approach used to fabricate such ordered micro-honeycomb arrays. However, the harsh preparation conditions and specific polymer architecture required have limited the widespread application of this approach. In this work, by using a commercial linear homopolymer and introducing its nonsolvent, we successfully fabricated uniform micro-honeycomb arrays on a large scale in just seconds and at ambient humidity. The morphology of the structures can be easily tuned via controlling the preparation conditions. Furthermore, high fill-factor convex micro-lenses were prepared based on the as-prepared concave micro-honeycomb arrays as templates through a simple replication process. They demonstrate properties such as clear multiple image presentation and light diffraction. They can also assist the strong scattering of light, which enhances the fluorescent intensity by more than 10%. This method is envisaged as a potential candidate to replace breath figure self-assembly for micro-honeycomb arrays in a low-cost and high-efficiency manner under mild conditions.