Abstract
Nanoimprinting by thermoplastic forming has attracted significant attention due to its promise of low-cost fabrication of functionalized surfaces and nanostructured devices, and metallic glasses have been identified as a material class ideally suited for nanoimprinting. In particular, their featureless atomic structure suggests that there may not be an intrinsic size limit to the material’s ability to replicate a mould. Here we demonstrate atomic-scale imprinting into a platinum-based metallic glass alloy under ambient conditions using atomic step edges of a strontium titanate single crystal as a mould. The moulded metallic glass replicates the ‘atomic smoothness’ of the strontium titanate, with identical roughness to the one measured on the mould even after multiple usages and with replicas exhibiting an exceptional long-term stability of years. By providing a practical, reusable, and potentially high-throughput approach for atomic imprinting, our findings may open novel applications in surface functionalization through topographical structuring.
Highlights
Nanoimprinting by thermoplastic forming has attracted significant attention due to its promise of low-cost fabrication of functionalized surfaces and nanostructured devices, and metallic glasses have been identified as a material class ideally suited for nanoimprinting
With details of the imprinting method provided in the methods section below, the general procedure is as follows: first, the top plate as well as the bottom plate with the freshly prepared strontium titanate (STO) crystal placed onto it are heated at 270 °C, which was found to be the temperature Pt-bulk metallic glasses (BMGs) possesses the perfect viscosity for accurate flow
A BMG ingot is placed on the substrate and given time to equilibrate before the force is slowly ramped up to ≈1 kN
Summary
Nanoimprinting by thermoplastic forming has attracted significant attention due to its promise of low-cost fabrication of functionalized surfaces and nanostructured devices, and metallic glasses have been identified as a material class ideally suited for nanoimprinting. Their featureless atomic structure suggests that there may not be an intrinsic size limit to the material’s ability to replicate a mould. As the moulding process is similar to other highly scalable and practical nanomoulding methods but yields feature sizes dramatically smaller than these, we expect rapid proliferation of this finding and method (i) to study structure and deformation of glasses and (ii) for technological applications similar to those currently occupied by nanoimprinting, such as higher data density[1], larger surface areas in catalysts[5,10,11], or the precise shaping of surface morphologies for surface functionalization[4,5,6]
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