NSF Proposal CMMI-1156126 seeks travel awards for graduate students, post-docs, as well as under-represented and junior faculty to attend and present at the four-day symposium on Mechanical Nanofabrication, Nanopatterning and Nanoassembly, to be held during the 2011 Materials Research Society Fall Meeting. This symposium will bring together researchers in the area of basic mechanics, nanomechanics, and mechanics of materials with the engineers and industrialists developing and using mechanical means of nanoscale scalable manufacturing. It will provide a forum to define and present problems and solution pathways through expanded scientific understanding of the underlying processes and multi-scale interfacial phenomena that govern mechanically based fabrication spanning nanoscopic to macroscopic dimensions.
The field of mechanics of nanofabrication is making rapid advances with the potential to greatly impact future scalable manufacturing strategies. It is critical to assemble a diverse community that embraces this work at the interface. This community will promote continued scientific advancement and to encourage the development of new inter-disciplinary researchers.
This activity will:
?Encourage an inclusive community of researchers with interdisciplinary perspectives working on the mechanics of nanoscale manufacturing ?Publicize recent advances in the mechanics of nanomanufacturing applied to industrial problems as well as novel fundamental theoretical insights ?Initiate exchange of ideas and promote new multi-disciplinary collaborations among mechanical engineers, material scientists, chemists and industrialists ?Enable junior scientists (including graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior faculty) to present their research findings and to interact with the community of established and prominent researchers in this field.
The funds provided by NSF will be used to award 20 symposium participants with travel support of $500 each. The goal of this support is to broaden the participation of a diverse group of junior researchers including women and underrepresented minorities who otherwise may be financially restricted from attending the symposium to present their research.
Symposium FF: Mechanical Nanofabrication, Nanopatterning, and Nanoassembly The scaling of lithographic patterns towards 10 nm dimensions is an ongoing challenge. The directed assembly of block copolymers using lithographically defined patterns is one of the proposed solutions, however, it requires the prepatterning of the substrate to create the guiding structures. An innovative approach to simplify the process was reported by B. A. Helms (Berkeley) in session FF1: Nanoimprint Fabrication Methods. The group uses a polystyrene-PDMS block copolymer blended with short fluoroalkyl chains. During thermal nanoimprint the fluoroalkyle chains substantially reduce the film adhesion and the PS-b-PDMS block copolymer allows for sub 10 nm patterns. As a result highly aligned, sub 10 nm features can be printed on predefined positions on the substrate in a single patterning step. The deposition of metallic electrodes onto self assembled monolayers (SAMs) often leads to the creation of shorts due to pin-hole defects in the SAM. This fact hampers the clean detection of electronic effects across the organic layer. A highly inventive approach presented by C.C. Bof Bufon (IFW-Dresden) in Session FF4: Fluidic and Directed Self Assembly Techniques provides an effective solution to this challenge. The SAM is deposited onto a stressed layer grown on a semiconducting substrate including a sacrificial layer. Upon release of the sacrificial layer the stressed layer rolls up to form a cylinder. As a result the layer originally in direct contact with the sacrificial layer touches the SAM on the top surface in a controlled manner. The thickness and the elasticity of the rolled up material leads to a firm yet gentle contact of both surfaces, which allows to characterize the electronic properties of the monolayer in great detail.
