Mikhail Ladanov's Weblog

If one needs a periodic pattern of metallic nanoislands, and size of interest is too small for easy and conventional lithography, microspheres lithography can be used. The idea is very simple – deposit a Self-Assembling Monolayer (SAM) of polystyrene spheres…

…evaporate metal on top…

…and wash these spheres away by sonication in toluene.

What’s left will be triangle periodic nanoislands.  Density of which can be controlled by size of the spheres.