PMMA–ZnO Hybrid Arrays Using in Situ Polymerization and Imprint Lithography

Abstract

Imprint lithography has been explored as a method to transfer arrays of patterned features onto pure polymers and polymer/metallic nanoparticle composites. However, it has never been achieved on the submicrometer scale with polymer–oxide particle hybrids. This study uses in situ polymerization and imprint lithography to form ZnO–PMMA hybrid patterns. The polymerization temperature is varied to study its effects on feature fidelity, film flexibility, and pattern photoluminescence (PL) response. For a given polymerization temperature, the feature fidelity decreases with increasing ZnO content according to line-edge roughness (LER), inverse circularity (IC), and surface roughness (SR) measurements. This decrease in feature fidelity indicates an increase in particle agglomeration as the ZnO content increases. The elongation at failure for the hybrids decreases with the polymerization temperature and the ZnO content while the bending radius increases. Even at the lowest feature fidelity, the LER is <10% of the...