Noise-Assisted Crystallization of Opal Films

International audience; An improvement of the crystal quality of opal fi lms self-assembled from polymer spheres in a moving meniscus using the agitation by white noise acoustic vibrations is demonstrated. A tenfold higher ordering of a hexagonal sphere packing in the (111) plane is achieved. This crystallization method, the mechanism of which is described in terms of the stochastic resonance, is a contrast to the widely used approach based on maintaining equilibrium conditions during the crystallization process. The precise quantifi cation of the incremental lattice order improvement as a function of acoustic noise intensity is achieved by calculating the probability of finding an opposite…