Deep UV microsphere nanolithography to achieve sub-100 nm feature size

Abstract

Nano-fabrication technologies are usually associated with complication, high cost, and limited area of coverage. However, advances in optics and nanophotonics constantly demand novel fabrications for nano-manufacturing systems with extraordinary optical, electrical, mechanical, or thermal responses. While, these properties are vital for health, energy, and information technology applications, proposing new methods of fabricating nanostructures that can be compatible with high throughput and large scale manufacturing is quite desirable. Here, we propose a deep ultra-violet (DUV) photolithography technique that can produce a variety of periodic nanostructure clusters with sub-100 nm feature sizes. The method is based on microsphere nanolithography, which focuses DUV field into a socalled photonic nano-jet – a propagative intensive field underneath the sphere. The position of a photonic nano-jet can be moved by changing the angle of exposure. The DUV microsphere nanolithography is inherently self-aligned, mask-less and optics-less (the bulky optical element such as lens is not required), which makes this method attractive for low-cost and high-throughput nano-manufacturing schemes, such as roll-to-roll production. Here, we present fabricated arrays of nanoscale complex structures to demonstrate the capabilities of this nanolithography method.