Dip Pen Nanolithography Heats Up

摘要

As we march along the inexorable path toward nan-otechnology, there is a seemingly endless array of ideas about how to get there. One increasingly popular idea is dip pen nanolithography (DPN), which uses atomic force microscopy (AFM) probes to write nanometer-scale lines directly onto a substrate. Now researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta) and the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL, Washington) have improved upon the technique, using heat to achieve some important new capabilities. Dubbed thermal dip pen nanolithography (tDPN), the new technique overcomes previous limitations that have been encountered by dozens of research groups.