Nanofacet Lithography: A New Bottom-Up Approach to Nanopatterning and Nanofabrication by Soft Replication of Spontaneously Faceted Crystal Surfaces

摘要

The large-scale patterning of materials and molecules down to nanometer feature sizes is a critical issue of nanoscience and nanotechnology. Photolithography is limited by the wavelength of light, which is 193 nm for the deep-UV technology used today in industry, while extreme-UV technology under development can reach 50 nm feature sizes, aiming for 32 nm in 2009. These limitations have motivated an extensive exploration of alternative lithographies based on self-assembly. Soft lithography is a versatile approach for the replication of patterns into a broad variety of media, but the original pattern, as in photolithography, has usually to be generated by other methods. Nanopattern generation systems (NPGSs) include electron-beam lithography and scanning-probe nanolithographies, such as dip-pen nanolithography and constructive nanolithography, which can reach feature sizes down to 5, 30, and 9 nm, respectively.