Self-organized Archimedean Spiral Pattern: Regular Bundling of Fullerene through Solvent Evaporation

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the spontaneous formation of regular Archimedean spiral patterns of fullerene through solvent evaporation, with controllable features influenced by liquid bridge thickness and solution concentration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel self-organized pattern formation mechanism for fullerenes via solvent evaporation, revealing controllable parameters and underlying traveling wave dynamics.

Findings

Spiral patterns exhibit micrometer-scale equi-spacing.

Pattern features are tunable by liquid bridge thickness and concentration.

The formation mechanism involves traveling waves and stick-slip contact line motion.

Abstract

We report the spontaneous generation of an Archimedean spiral pattern of fullerene via the evaporation of solvent. The self-organized spiral pattern exhibited equi-spacing on the order of micrometer between neighboring stripes. The characteristics of the spirals, such as the spacing between stripes, the number of stripes and the band width of stripes, could be controlled by tuning the thickness of the liquid bridge and the concentration of solution. The mechanism of pattern formation is interpreted in terms of a specific traveling wave on the liquid-solid interface accompanied by a stick-slip process of the contact line.