Preparation of Silver-Coated Polystyrene Composite Particles

We report a feasible approach to the preparation of monodispersed metal-shell composite microspheres based on a combination of surface reaction and surface seeding techniques. The method was implemented for coating polystyrene (PS) spheres with silver shell having a variable thickness by controlling the amount of reagents in the reaction procedure. These composite spherical particles in dimensions of the submicrometer range may become attractive building blocks for the creation of metallo-dielectric photonic band gap materials when they are organized into crystals.