Facile fabrication of stretchable photonic Ag nanostructures by soft-contact patterning of ionic Ag solution coatings

We describe a rapid and simple method to create Ag nanostructures by using direct mechanical patterning of ionic Ag ink coating under gentle pressure, then thermal annealing to reduce the ionic Ag ink to a metallic Ag layer. The ionic liquid-phase Ag coating is easily obtained by spin-coating ionic Ag ink that has appropriate Ag concentration and can be either printed or imprinted on the desired substrate by using a soft elastomer patterning mold, then reduced to the Ag nanostructure by subsequent thermal annealing. More specifically, we present two methods: transfer printing and soft nanoimprinting. In transfer printing, the ionic Ag ink is first inked onto the elastomer mold which then contacts the target substrate to transfer the Ag nanopattern. In soft nanoimprinting, the elastomer mold conducts soft imprinting to engineer the ionic Ag ink coating to the Ag nanostructure. We systematically investigate the optimal patterning conditions by controlling the initial Ag ink concentration and the coating, printing, imprinting, and annealing conditions, to derive Ag architecture that has tunable photonic functionality. As an example, we demonstrate polarization-sensitive reflective color filters that exploit shape-tunable Ag nanostructures fabricated by soft nanoimprinting using a controllably-stretched elastomer mold.