Nanolithography, the ability to fabricate useful structures with at least one lateral dimension between the size of an individual atom and 100 nm, is an essential component to modern industry and is fundamental to many emerging technologies, including magnetics, electronics, photonics, biomaterials, medicine, ultrafiltration, as well as energy collection and storage. This emergence is primarily due to the materials properties entering a new regime at these size scales, where discoveries of novel material interactions are continually being made. At present, these innovations are pushing beyond the capabilities of traditional optical lithography, the historical method (similar to photography) for producing small features, and, instead, rely on very expensive and time-intensive methods, including electron and focused ion beam lithography. Many useful structures for application and fundamental study rely on periodicity (e.g., repeating lines, dots, rings, etc.); such structures naturally lend themselves to organic materials that self-assemble into periodic shapes. This talk will focus on the directed self-assembly of block polymer thin films. Such materials naturally self-assemble into a wide-range of morphologies (i.e., shapes); however, without direction, this order has little periodicity at large lateral length scales. The solvent-induced, directed ordering of self-assembled block polymer thin films allows access to these novel periodic nanostructures with unprecedented control and precision, including newly discovered morphologies, placing this cheap and rapid method of nanolithography in competition with very expensive and time-intensive methods currently in use within the nanoelectronic, ultrafiltration, biosensing and magnetic storage industries.

Directed self-assembly: A new frontier for nanolithography

253rd National Meeting (2017)

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