  Patterned substrates for optics, electronics, sensing, lab-on-chip
technologies, bioanalytics, clinical diagnostics as well as translational and
personalized medicine are typically prepared by additive substrate
manufacturing including ballistic printing and microcontact printing. However,
ballistic printing (e.g., ink jet and aerosol jet printing, laser-induced
forward transfer) involves serial pixel-by-pixel ink deposition. Parallel
additive pattering by microcontact printing is performed with solid elastomeric
stamps suffering from ink depletion after a few stamp-substrate contacts. The
throughput limitations of additive state-of-the-art patterning thus arising may
be overcome by capillary stamping - parallel additive substrate patterning
without ink depletion by mesoporous silica stamps, which enable ink supply
through the mesopores anytime during stamping. Thus, either arrays of
substrate-bound nanoparticles or colloidal nanodispersions of detached
nanoparticles are accessible. We processed three types of model inks: 1) drug
solutions, 2) solutions containing metallopolymers and block copolymers as well
as 3) nanodiamond suspensions representing colloidal nanoparticle inks. Thus,
we obtained aqueous colloidal nanodispersions of stamped drug nanoparticles,
regularly arranged ceramic nanoparticles by post-stamping pyrolysis of stamped
metallopolymeric precursor nanoparticles and regularly arranged nanodiamond
nanoaggregates. Capillary stamping may overcome the throughput limitations of
state-of-the-art additive substrate manufacturing while a broad range of
different inks can be processed.
