Challenges on Optical Printing of Colloidal Nanoparticles

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state, challenges, and future prospects of optical printing techniques for precise placement and manipulation of colloidal nanoparticles on substrates, emphasizing accuracy, resolution, selectivity, and stability.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of optical printing methods for nanoparticles, highlighting key challenges and potential future directions in the field.

Findings

Optical printing enables versatile nanoparticle deposition.

Current limitations include accuracy, resolution, and stability.

Future research should address photostability and selectivity improvements.

Abstract

While colloidal chemistry provides ways to obtain a great variety of nanoparticles, with different shapes, sizes, material composition, and surface functions, their controlled deposition and combination on arbitrary positions of substrates remains a considerable challenge. Over the last ten years, optical printing arose as a versatile method to achieve this purpose for different kinds of nanoparticles. In this article we review the state of the art of optical printing of single nanoparticles, and discuss its strengths, limitations, and future perspectives, by focusing on four main challenges: printing accuracy, resolution, selectivity, and nanoparticles photostability.