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Nanolithography

Written with light

Nature Nanotechnology volume 5, pages 629–630 (2010)Cite this article

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An array of polymer tips that can channel light to an underlying substrate can be used to generate intricate nanostructures with high throughput and over large areas.

Lithography techniques are used to fabricate micro- and nanoscale structures that are important in applications such as integrated circuits and microelectromechanical systems. In photolithography, light is used to transfer a pattern from a pre-engineered mask to a light-sensitive photoresist on a surface. However, the smallest feature sizes that can be patterned using this method are limited to about half of the wavelength of the light used. Various techniques have been developed to overcome this diffraction limit1,2,3, and these methods can also produce numerous features simultaneously, but they can be difficult to implement and the range of patterns that they can generate is limited. Alternatively, arbitrary, complex patterns can be easily created using methods based on scanning probe microscopy, but these techniques have the disadvantage of low throughput. Writing in Nature Nanotechnology, Chad Mirkin and colleagues at Northwestern University now report on beating the diffraction limit with a technique based on high-throughput scanning probe microscopy that they call beam-pen lithography4.

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Figure 1: Beam-pen lithography.

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Affiliations

  1. Department of Pure and Applied Chemistry, Aaron Hernandez-Santana and Duncan Graham are in the Centre for Molecular Nanometrology, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow G1 1XL, UK. duncan.graham@strath.ac.uk

    Aaron Hernandez-Santana & Duncan Graham

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  1. Aaron Hernandez-Santana
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  2. Duncan Graham
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Hernandez-Santana, A., Graham, D. Written with light. Nature Nanotech 5, 629–630 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2010.179

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