Conformal Self-Assembly of Nanospheres for Light-Enhanced Airtightness Monitoring and Room-Temperature Gas Sensing

The fabrication of conformal nanostructures on microarchitectures is of great significance for diverse applications. Here a facile and universal method was developed for conformal self-assembly of nanospheres on various substrates including convex bumps and concave holes. Hydrophobic microarchitectures could be transferred into superhydrophilic ones using plasma treatment due to the formation of numerous hydroxyl groups. Because of superhydrophilicity, the nanosphere suspension spread on the microarchitectures quickly and conformal self-assembly of nanospheres can be realized. Besides, the feature size of the conformal nanospheres on the substrates could be further regulated by plasma treatment. After transferring two-dimensional tungsten disulfide sheets onto the conformal nanospheres, the periodic nanosphere array was demonstrated to be able to enhance the light harvesting of WS2. Based on this, a light-enhanced room-temperature gas sensor with a fast recovery speed (<35 s) and low detecting limit (500 ppb) was achieved. Moreover, the WS2-covered nanospheres on the microarchitectures were very sensitive to the changes in air pressure due to the formation of suspended sheets on the convex bumps and concave holes. A sensitive photoelectronic pressure sensor that was capable of detecting the airtightness of vacuum devices was developed using the WS2-decorated hierarchical architectures. This work provides a simple method for the fabrication of conformal nanospheres on arbitrary substrates, which is promising for three-dimensional microfabrication of multifunctional hierarchical microarchitectures for diverse applications, such as biomimetic compound eyes, smart wetting surfaces and photonic crystals.