Ink-Lithography for Property Engineering and Patterning of Nanocrystal Thin Films

Next-generation devices and systems require the development and integration of advanced materials, the realization of which inevitably requires two separate processes: property engineering and patterning. Here, we report a one-step, ink-lithography technique to pattern and engineer the properties of thin films of colloidal nanocrystals that exploits their chemically addressable surface. Colloidal nanocrystals are deposited by solution-based methods to form thin films and a local chemical treatment is applied using an ink-printing technique to simultaneously modify (i) the chemical nature of the nanocrystal surface to allow thin-film patterning and (ii) the physical electronic, optical, thermal, and mechanical properties of the nanocrystal thin films. The ink-lithography technique is applied to the library of colloidal nanocrystals to engineer thin films of metals, semiconductors, and insulators on both rigid and flexible substrates and demonstrate their application in high-resolution image replications, anticounterfeit devices, multicolor filters, thin-film transistors and circuits, photoconductors, and wearable multisensors.