San Ming Yang

TL;DR: In this article, a novel technique termed directed evaporation-induced self-assembly (DEISA) is proposed to enable the formation of planarized opal-based microphotonic crystal chips in which opal crystal shape, size, and orientation are under synthetic control.

TL;DR: In this paper, a simple, quick, reproducible and inexpensive method is described that combines self-assembly, micro-fluidics and soft lithography to achieve a novel example of vectorial control of thickness, area, orientation and registry of patterned single crystal silica colloidal crystals in silicon wafers, coined opal chips.

TL;DR: In this article, a method to control the degree of connectivity of the colloidal particles making up a colloidal crystal and, consequently, the pore size, filling fraction, mechanical stability and optical properties, without disrupting its long range order and without the deleterious effects of lattice contraction induced cracking observed in conventional necking methods based on thermal sintering is presented.

TL;DR: In this article, a supramolecular origami theoretical model was used to explain the creation of mesoporous silica, hollow helicoid shapes, which have a hierarchical architecture comprised of 5 nm diameter channels that coil in the form of a micrometerscale tubular spiral.