Fabrication of metallic nanostructures by negative nanoimprint lithography

Abstract

This paper describes a negative nanoimprint lithography (N-NIL) technique forfabricating metallic nanostructures via combining conventional nanoimprint lithography(NIL) with wet chemical etching. Various metallic nanostructures such as goldgrating, gold/chromium alternate bimetallic grating and gold nanoelectrode arrays,which are negative replications of the stamp pattern, have been fabricated withN-NIL. This method has demonstrated its advantages on varying the feature size ofobtained metallic nanostructures with a single stamp as well as on fabricatingbimetallic nanostructures. In addition, it offers a unique path to fabricate micro–nanocomplex structures in a single imprint process, which compensates the limitation ofconventional nanoimprint lithography and maintains the advantages of conventionalnanoimprint lithography such as high throughput, low cost and sub-100 nm resolution.