Stress Engineered Polymeric Nanostructures by Self-Organized Splitting of Microstructures

Abstract

We propose a generic, simple, and parallel nanofabrication technique to obtain three-dimensional multiscale nanostructures based on stress-induced cracking of thin film polymeric microstructures at their sharp edges. The technique was applied to obtain an array of nanochannels on large areas (∼squared centimeters) with channel widths and heights of ∼100 nm. The technique offers flexibility in nanofabrication by providing very simple controls on the feature size, aspect ratio, and the complexity of the nanostructures thus obtained.