Abstract
Crack formation drives material failure and is often regarded as a process to be avoided1,2,3. However, closer examination of cracking phenomena has revealed exquisitely intricate patterns such as spirals4, oscillating5,6,7 and branched7 fracture paths and fractal geometries8. Here we demonstrate the controlled initiation, propagation and termination of a variety of channelled crack patterns in a film/substrate system9,10,11 comprising a silicon nitride thin film deposited on a silicon substrate using low-pressure chemical vapour deposition. Micro-notches etched into the silicon substrate concentrated stress for crack initiation, which occurred spontaneously during deposition of the silicon nitride layer. We reproducibly created three distinct crack morphologies—straight, oscillatory and orderly bifurcated (stitchlike)—through careful selection of processing conditions and parameters. We induced direction changes by changing the system parameters, and we terminated propagation at pre-formed multi-step crack stops. We believe that our patterning technique presents new opportunities in nanofabrication and offers a starting point for atomic-scale pattern formation12, which would be difficult even with current state-of-the-art nanofabrication methodologies.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by Creative Research Initiatives (Research Center of MEMS Space Telescope) of MEST/NRF. We thank Y.Y. Earmme at KAIST for discussions and J. Yeo, Y. D. Suh, S. Hong, P. Lee, Y. Rho and J.-A. Jeon for technical assistance with fabrications and experiments.
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K.H.N. conceived the study, discovered the control of cracking using microfabrication, conducted experiments and theoretical study of the phenomena, and invented DISL. K.H.N. and I.H.P. designed mask patterns for photolithography and fabricated samples. S.H.K. did the post-processing and conducted experiments. K.H.N. and S.H.K. wrote the paper and discussed the results. All authors commented on the manuscript.
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Supplementary Information
This file contains Supplementary Methods, Supplementary Discussions 1-10, Supplementary Figures 1-11 and Supplementary References. (PDF 1294 kb)
Supplementary Movie
This Supplementary Movie file shows a video clip of wafer size long oscillation. (MOV 5508 kb)
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Nam, K., Park, I. & Ko, S. Patterning by controlled cracking. Nature 485, 221–224 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11002
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11002
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