Position Control of Metal Nanoparticles by Self-Assembly

Bottom-up self-assembly has the capacity to overcome the limitation of top down nanofabrication. Recently, nanoparticles or molecules are expected to use as the building blocks. By using them it is desirable to place nanometer sized components such as nanopartilces in exact positions for nano-fabrication with high precision and reproducibility. In particular, gold (Au) nanoparticles, which covalently linked to biomolecules such as DNA, peptides, nucleic acids, proteins, and cell have attracted much attention for biosensing application, bioimaging application and so on. In this study, we present a novel and simple method of position control of Au nanoparticles on a nanopattern by self-assembly techniques such as block copolymer phase separation and self-assembled monolayers. Spherical Au nanoparticles were immobilized above the Au nanopatterns with a gap of a few nanometers. We believe this method will contribute to studies on the observation of single biomolecules such as DNA, peptides, nucleic acids, proteins, and so on.