The sample deposited at 7.8 mN/m had lower transmittance than the other two samples in long wavelength range, which XMU-MP-1 research buy may be due to the lower coverage of nanospheres on plain
glass. We suspect that nanosphere aggregations formed when pressure went higher than collapse pressure, which caused the shift of transmission peak. Thus, samples deposited at p= 22.2 and 28.0 mN/m were nanospheres with different aggregation degrees rather than monolayer film of nanospheres. Figure 3 Transmission spectra. (a) AR films deposited at different pressures. (b) AR films deposited from fresh suspension with 1.0 mM, fresh suspension with 1.9 mM CTAB concentration and ageing suspension with 1.9 mM CTAB. Concentration of surfactant, CTAB in
this study, is another important parameter in the deposition process. The influence of concentration of surfactant on the optical transmission of the resulting film was studied. Bardosova et al. [20] reported on the deposition of colloidal click here crystals of silica particles by the LB method without using surfactant, providing the diameter lies in the range 180 to 360 nm. We found that, on the one hand, without surfactant, deposition of 100-nm nanospheres on glass slides was difficult to achieve; on the other hand, high concentration of CTAB cause aggregations of nanospheres during deposition. Suspensions with CTAB concentrations of 1.0 and 1.9 mM were used to investigate its influence on AR performance. The effect of solution ageing was
investigated by preparing a suspension of 1.9 mM CTAB and using it to deposit at t = 0 and 30 days. Transmission spectra are shown in Figure 3a in which a peak shift can be found between the three spectra. The spectral peak shifted from 450 to 550 nm by increasing CTAB concentration from 1.0 to 1.9 mM. Ageing suspension was also found to cause the peak shifts. Given the same CTAB concentration of 1.9 mM, AR film deposited from fresh suspension and from ageing suspension (30 days old) showed different transmission peaks. The peak shifted from 578 to 804 nm as shown in Figure 3b. We suspect that the solution aggregates over time, which leads to aggregations in the thin films and GBA3 the peak shifts. This assumption was supported by our SEM image analysis. SEM images of the three samples were given in Figure 4a,b,c. Image processing software (ImageJ) was used to estimate the coverage of the nanospheres. The area covered by the nanospheres was found to be approximately 78.90%. Assuming that nanospheres are monodispersed with a diameter of 100 nm, we are able to calculate the volume ratio occupied by nanospheres, which is 52.61%. A simple weighted model was used to calculate the equivalent refractive index of the monolayer silica spheres since the sphere diameter and the film thickness were both 100 nm which is small enough compared to the wavelength of visible light.