Abstract
Lithography was invented in late 18th century Bavaria by an ambitious young playwright named Alois Senefelder. Senefelder experimented with stone, wax, water and ink in the hope of finding a way of reproducing text so that he might financially gain from a wider distribution of his already successful scripts. His discovery not only facilitated the profitability of his plays, but also provided the world with an affordable printing press that would ultimately democratize the dissemination of art, knowledge and literature. Since Senefelder, experiments in lithography have continued with a range of innovations including the use of electron beams and UV that allow increasingly higher-resolution features [1, 2]. Applications for this have now breached the limits of paper printing into the realms of semiconductor and microelectronic mechanical systems technology. In this issue, researchers demonstrate a technique for fabricating periodic features in poly(3,4-ethylene dioxythiophene)–poly(styrenesulfonate) (PEDOT–PSS) [3]. Their method combines field enhancements from silica nanospheres with laser-interference lithography to provide a means of patterning a polymer that has the potential to open the market of low-end, high-volume microelectronics.
Laser-interference lithography has already been used successfully in patterning. Researchers in Korea used laser-interference lithography to generate stamps for imprinting a two-dimensional photonic crystal structure into green light emitting diodes (LEDs) [4]. The imprinted patterns comprised depressions 100 nm deep and 180 nm wide with a periodicity of 295 nm. In comparison with unpatterned LEDs, the intensity of photoluminescence was enhanced by a factor of seven in the LEDs that had the photonic crystal structures imprinted in them.
The potential of exploiting field enhancements around nanostructures for new technologies has also attracted a great deal of attention. Researchers in the USA and Australia have used the field enhancements around an array of nanorods to improve the operation of a Schottky diode device operating in reverse bias. The diode is used for gas sensing, an application that also benefits from the high surface to volume ratio of nanostructures for gas adsorption [5]. Enhancing the electric field is also hugely advantageous for Raman spectroscopy. The vibrational modes probed with Raman spectroscopy provide a useful, highly distinctive molecular signature but the signal is weak. An array of nanoneedles fabricated by researchers in China and Japan has demonstrated controllable and repeatable enhancements to Raman signals of 108 [6]. Researchers in the UK have demonstrated how the field enhancements resulting from the plasmonic properties of metal nanoparticles can be tuned to carefully manipulate their effect on the fluorescence intensity, lifetime and Raman signal from nearby fluorophores. They also successfully decoupled the effects on radiative and non-radiative decay and shed light on the hot spots present in surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy measurements. Plasmonics has enormous potential in the field of optoelectronics. In recognition of the fertility of research in this field, Nanotechnology will publish a special issue on plasmonics in optoeletronics later this year.
The work of Suman Das and colleagues in the USA and Germany reported in this issue combines both field enhancements and laser-interference lithography to impart a nanoporous structure to a polymer with high industrial potential. PEDOT–PSS has high conductivity and is also moderately transparent, making it eligible for transparent conductors in electroluminescent devices, conducting layers in capacitors, photovoltaic cells and sensors. It has also been considered recently for bioelectronic applications, in particular neuronal cell signalling and neural interfaces, as a result of its electronic and ionic conductivity. The researchers irradiated a monolayer of silica nanospheres on a film of PEDOT–PSS with interfering laser beams. The interference gave rise to a periodic line-like pattern in the intensity distribution of the incident field. In addition, the silica spheres cause enhancements to the incident field that result in the formation of patterns of craters, cavities and holes in the PEDOT–PSS. The researchers confirm the viability of their fabrication process with Mie scattering theory calculations. The technique has a number of advantages over previous methods for creating nanoporous structures in PEDOT–PSS, including efficiency, high-resolution and low cost as a clean room is not required. The stage is set for more technological developments as innovations in lithography and combinations with other techniques continue to play a leading role in high-resolution patterning and fabrication at the nanoscale.
References
[1] Grigorescu A E and Hagen C W 2009 Nanotechnology 20 292001
[2] Lin B J 1975 J. Vac. Sci. Technol. 12 1317–20
[3] Yuan D, Lasagni A, Hendricks J L, Martin D C and Das S 2012 Nanotechnology 23 015304
[4] Kim S H, Lee K-D, Kim J-Y, Kwon M-K and Park S-J 2007 Nanotechnology 18 055306
[5] Yu J, Ippolito S J, Wlodarski W, Strano M and Kalantar-Zadeh K 2010 Nanotechnology 21 265502
[6] Yang Y, Tanemura M, Huang Z, Jiang D, Li Z-Y, Huang Y-P, Kawamura G, Yamaguchi K and Nogami M 2010 Nanotechnology 21 325701
[7] Cade N I, Ritman-Meer T, Kwakwa K A and Richards D 2009 Nanotechnology 20 285201