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The fast development of nanoscience, especially in the field of nanoelectronics, nanophotonics and plasmonics, has shown a great demand for new nanofabrication techniques to fulfil diverse requirements. The nanolithographic methods, e.g conventional photolithography, focused electron beams lithography (EBL), and focus ion beams (FIB), all exhibit the capability for nanostructure fabrication but most of them inherently suffer from their nature, which limit the size of nanostructures, fabrication area, and throughput at reasonable costs. The limitations of these conventional lithographic techniques have motivated the development of alternative approaches such as micro-contact printing, scanning probe lithography and nanoimprinting lithography (NIL). In this paper, we propose a new alternative laser based approach which could satisfy the requirements of high resolution, fast processing speed for large area fabrication of sub-wavelength nanohole and nanoparticle arrays with feature size controllably varied from a few tens to a few hundreds nanometers. The technique, named as plasmonic nanoparticle lithography, effectively combines the laser induced transfer (LIT) [1, 2] and light-induced near-field nanomodification [3, 4] relying on the optical enhancement and thermal effect in near-field under spherical plasmonic nanoparticles. It allows producing ordered sub-wavelength nanohole arrays in a thin mask layer (e.g. Chromium film) upon laser exposure. Subsequent post-processing allows transferring the nanohole array into a desired substrate or converting it into an array of pillars made out of a desired material.
References:
1. A. I. Kuznetsov, A. B. Evlyukhin, M. R. Gonçalves, C. Reinhardt, A. Koroleva, M. L. Arnedillo, R. Kiyan, O. Marti, and B. N. Chichkov, “Laser fabrication of large-scale nanoparticle arrays for sensing applications”, ACS Nano., 5(6),4843-9 (2011).
2. A. I. Kuznetsov, R. Kiyan, and B. N. Chichkov, "Laser fabrication of 2D and 3D metal nanoparticle structures and arrays", Optics Express, 18(20), 21198-21203 (2010).
3. P. G. Kika, S. A. Maiera and H. A. Atwater, Plasmon Printing - a New Approach to Near-Field Lithography, 2001 MRS Fall Meeting, MRS Proceedings, Volume 705 (2001).
4. A. Plech, V. Kotaidis, M. Lorenc and J. Boneberg, “Femtosecond laser near-field ablation from gold nanoparticles”, Nature Physics, 2, 44- 47 (2006).
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