Advanced Nanofabrication Techniques
Well-defined model systems are needed for better understanding of the relationship between catalytic properties of nanoparticles and their structure. Chemical synthesis of metal nanoparticles results in large size and shape dispersion and lack of lateral order.
Extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography has the throughput and simplicity advantages of photolithography as well as high resolution due to its wavelength which makes it superior to conventional top-down lithography techniques.
Using EUV achromatic Talbot lithography, we have obtained 15 nm particle arrays with a periodicity of about 100 nm over an area of several square centimeters with high-throughput enabling the use of nanotechnology for fabrication of model systems to study large ensembles of well-defined identical nanoparticles with a density of 1010particles cm−2.
This large scale patterning of identical nanoparticles provides good signal-to-noise ratio to study model systems in common analytical and characterization techniques.
Selected publications
- W. Karim, S. A. Tschupp, M. Oezaslan, T. J. Schmidt, J. Gobrecht, J. A. van Bokhoven, Y. Ekinci, High-resolution and large-area nanoparticle arrays using EUV interference lithography, Nanoscale, 2015, 7, 7386-7393. external page DOI:10.1039/C5NR00565E.