Soft thermal nanoimprint lithography using a nanocomposite mold

摘要

Soft nanoimprint lithography has been limited to ultraviolet (UV) curable resists. Here, we introduce a novel approach for soft thermal nanoimprinting. This unprecedented combination of the terms "soft" and "thermal" for nanoimprinting became possible thanks to an innovative nanocomposite mold consisting of a flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate with chemically attached rigid relief features. We used soft thermal nanoimprinting to produce high-resolution nanopatterns with a sub-100 nm feature size. Furthermore, we demonstrate the applicability of our nanoimprint approach for the nanofabrication of thermally imprinted nanopatterns on non-planar surfaces such as lenses. Our new nanofabrication strategy paves the way to numerous applications that require the direct fabrication of functional nanostructures on unconventional substrates.