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Flying plasmonic lens in the near field for high-speed nanolithography

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Abstract

The commercialization of nanoscale devices requires the development of high-throughput nanofabrication technologies that allow frequent design changes1,2. Maskless nanolithography3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13, including electron-beam and scanning-probe lithography, offers the desired flexibility but is limited by low throughput. Here, we report a new low-cost, high-throughput approach to maskless nanolithography that uses an array of plasmonic lenses that ‘flies’ above the surface to be patterned, concentrating short-wavelength surface plasmons into sub-100 nm spots. However, these nanoscale spots are only formed in the near field, which makes it very difficult to scan the array above the surface at high speed. To overcome this problem we have designed a self-spacing air bearing that can fly the array just 20 nm above a disk that is spinning at speeds of between 4 and 12 m s−1, and have experimentally demonstrated patterning with a linewidth of 80 nm. This low-cost nanofabrication scheme has the potential to achieve throughputs that are two to five orders of magnitude higher than other maskless techniques.

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Figure 1: High-throughput maskless nanolithography using plasmonic lens arrays.
Figure 2: Designs and simulations for the plasmonic lens and an air-bearing surface (ABS).
Figure 3: Fabricated plasmonic flying head and flying height measurement.
Figure 4: Maskless lithography by flying plasmonic lenses at the near field.

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Change history

  • 04 November 2008

    In the version of this Letter originally published online, the Author Contributions statement was incorrect. This has now been corrected for all versions of this Letter.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to Zhaowei Liu and Dongmin Wu for their helpful discussions. This work was financially supported by the NSF Centre for Scalable and Integrated NanoManufacturing (SINAM) (grant no. DMI-0327077) and in collaboration with Computer Mechanics Laboratory (CML) of University of California, Berkeley.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

X.Z. conceived the idea of using a plasmonic lens to do lithography and the idea of using an air bearing to fly a plasmonic lens array at near field for high-speed lithography and imaging, and also guided the system development and experiments. C.S., W.S. and L.P. designed and developed the optical and mechanical systems. W.S. and Y.W. fabricated the plasmonic lens arrays and the flying heads. L.P. and D.B.B. designed the air-bearing and tested the flying heads. W.S., L.P., Y.W. and C.S. conducted the experiments on plasmonic lithography.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Werayut Srituravanich or Xiang Zhang.

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Srituravanich, W., Pan, L., Wang, Y. et al. Flying plasmonic lens in the near field for high-speed nanolithography. Nature Nanotech 3, 733–737 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2008.303

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