Reliable Assembling of Colloidal Nanoparticles in Two and Three Dimensions by Dual-AFM-based Handling inside a Scanning Electron Microscope

胶体颗粒在化学和物理性质方面提供了各种微米和纳米尺寸的颗粒体系。如果单个胶体粒子以特定的空间顺序排列，它们可以共同作用于电子或与入射光波相互作用，从而实现光子学、等离子体或传感器的新应用。这一扩展项目旨在开发自动机器人程序，用于拾取和放置处理以及单个胶体颗粒的组装。为了实现这一目标，将优化纳米机器人工作站，以实现精确和全自动化的组装程序。应用众所周知的粘合引导搬运策略，该项目的一个基本目标是评估基于机器人的拾取和放置过程的基本限制，特别是对于逐渐变小的颗粒。此外，这一扩展项目旨在开发胶体颗粒的自动包装序列，以组装三维结构。最后，所开发的程序将被应用于制造功能光子和等离子体器件。将与纳米光子学和纳米光学领域的其他研究小组合作，就可实现的几何精度以及它们的电子和光学特性来确定这些器件的特征。

Colloidal particles provide a variety of micro- and nanosized particle systems in terms of chemical and physical properties. If individual colloidal particles are arranged in specific spatial order, they can collectively interact electronically or with incident light waves, enabling novel applications for photonics, plasmonics or sensors. This extension project aims to develop automated robotic procedures for the pick-and-place handling as well as the assembly of individual colloidal particles.To achieve this goal, a nanorobotic work station will be optimized in order to allow for precise and fully-automated assembly routines. Applying the well-known adhesion-guided handling strategies, an essential goal of this project is to evaluate the fundamental limits of the robotic based pick-and-place process, particularly with respect to progressively smaller particles. Furthermore, this extension project aims to develop automated packaging sequences of colloidal particles to assemble three-dimensional structures. Finally, the developed routines will be applied to fabricate functional photonic and plasmonic devices. These devices will be characterized with respect to the achievable geometric precision as well as to their electronic and optical properties in cooperation with other research groups from the field of nanophotonics and nano-optics.