This award investigates a new large-area patterning method to create patterns with nanometer-scale resolution and feature size. This new method combines carefully designed and shaped polymer pen arrays with controlled stiffness for lithography with precise chemistry and self-assembly to reach single-nanometer resolution across large areas. This project focuses on the following research thrusts: 1) Develop new mechanisms to achieve high pattern fidelity, while minimizing the diffusion of ink molecules that leads to pattern blurring and thus resolution loss; 2) Develop an accessible and broadly applicable method to achieve large-area polymer stamps with single-nanometer-scale features; and 3) Achieve large-area feature-size-tunable patterning with nanometer-scale resolution. Education, training, research, and nanomanufacturing will be tightly coupled to teaching, outreach, and broad dissemination. Students and post-doctoral candidates will work at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), the interdisciplinary hub at UCLA, which will also provide analysis tools and dissemination of the advances. The diverse fabrication needs of CNSI users will help drive development and application of this new method.
The fundamental research from this award will advance nanolithography to realize high-fidelity nanometer-scale resolution over large areas, one of the greatest challenges in nanoscale pattering, via polymer-pen chemical lift-off lithography. The proposed research will provide a new method to eliminate the lateral diffusion of ink molecules in soft lithography, which limits resolution to ~100nm, or worse, in conventional microcontact printing. High-fidelity single-nanometer-scale precision with sub-100nm feature sizes can be realized. The proposed strategies will provide methods to control precisely the feature size of the pattern at nanometer-scale resolution. This research will enable the manufacture of controllable sub-5nm features at large scales, a capability not yet achievable by other means, even serial techniques, such as electron-beam lithography. This technique will develop general, accessible technological strategies to push resolution to and below 5 nm. The proposed research will directly impact the field of nanomanufacturing, which will be advanced by innovative designs, transformative, scalable, high-throughput methods, greatly improved resolution, better understanding of nanoscale phenomena and processing, and interdisciplinary studies involving surface chemistry, mechanics, materials science, electronics, and biology. This research will be applied in a wide range of applications from electronics to energy and biology, including plasmonic nanostructured devices, single-molecule biological studies, biochemical sensors, wearable electronics, energy-storage and conversion devices, optical filters, biomedical devices, with improved performance due to precise control of pattern fidelity.
