Natural patterns, always, have the power to catch eye and intrigue mind. Patterned surfaces with anisotropic wettability are of great interest in fundamental and industrial applications. However, surface patterning relies heavily on high-end apparatuses and expensive moulds/masks and photoresists. Decomposition behaviors of polymers have been widely studied in material science, but as-created chemical and physical structural changes have been rarely considered as an opportunity for wettability manipulation.

In recent work, professor Yu-zhong Wang’s group report a facile and fast mask-free etching method for accurate surface patterning by controlling the confined decomposition of material surfaces. With a common printing technology, intrinsic, complex and accurate patterns (QR code, for example) are fabricated efficiently. Such intrinsic patterns can be used for realizing information storage and encryption. With selective wettability, pattern information can be stored and encrypted on the cellulose film; upon exposure to external stimuli, such as water, encryption keys can be read. Moreover, such a method can also be used to prepare functional materials, flexible electronics for instance. The as-prepared Ag electrode presents high electrical conductivity (63.9×10⁶ S cm^-1) and bending-deformation resistance.

Fig. 1 Fabrication strategy of accurate patterns with anisotropic wettability.

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (U21A2096), Science and Technology Fund for Distinguish Young Scholars of Sichuan Province (2019JDJQ0025), State Key Laboratory of Polymer Materials Engineering (sklpme2020-3-09), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2020SCUNL205) and the 111 project (B20001).

For more details, see our paper in Nature Communications:

A Confined-Etching Strategy for Intrinsic Anisotropic Surface Wetting Patterning

Rui Feng, Fei Song*, Ying-Dan Zhang, Xiu-Li Wang, Yu-Zhong Wang*

URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-30832-4