Superwettability of substrate has aroused profound influence on the production of novel and advanced colloidal assembly in recent decades owing to its effect on the spreading area, evaporation rate, and the resultant assembly structure. In this paper, we investigated a detailed influence of the superwettability of transfer/template substrate on the colloidal assembly from hybrid Top–down/bottom–up strategy. By taking advantage of a superhydrophilic flat transfer substrate and a superhydrophobic groove–structured silicon template, the patterned colloidal microsphere assembly was formed including linear, mesh–, cyclic– and multi–stopband assemblies arrays of microspheres, and the optic–waveguide of circular colloidal was demonstrated. We believed this liquid top–down/bottom–up strategy would open an efficient avenue for assembling/integrating microspheres building blocks into device applications in a low–cost manner.

ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces , 2016