Nanomanufacturing, the commercially-scalable and economically-sustainable mass production of nanoscale materials and devices, represents the tangible outcome of the nanotechnology revolution. In contrast to those used in nanofabrication for research purposes, nanomanufacturing processes must satisfy the additional constraints of cost, throughput, and time to market. Taking silicon integrated circuit manufacturing as a baseline, we consider the factors involved in matching processes with products, examining the characteristics and potential of top-down and bottom-up processes, and their combination. We also discuss how a careful assessment of the way in which function can be made to follow form can enable high-volume manufacturing of nanoscale structures with the desired useful, and exciting, properties.

A straightforward analytic model of resist line edge roughness is presented which predicts all the known scaling laws as well as the shape of the experimentally seen frequency content or power spectrum of the roughness. The model implies there are strong basic limitations to achieving, simultaneously, low roughness, low dose and high resolution in any standard chemically amplified resist process. A simple model of how roughness maps to device performance is also presented.

Molecularly directed self-assembly has the potential to become a nanomanufacturing technology if the critical factors governing the kinetics and yield of defect-free self-assembled structures can be understood and controlled. The kinetics of streptavidin-functionalized quantum dots binding to biontinylated DNA origami are quantitatively evaluated and to what extent the reaction rate and binding efficiency are controlled by the valency of the binding location, the biotin linker length, and the organization, and spacing of the binding locations on the DNA is shown. Yield improvement is systematically determined as a function of the valency of the binding locations and as a function of the quantum dot spacing. In addition, the kinetic studies show that the binding rate increases with increasing linker length, but that the yield saturates at the same level for long incubation times. The forward and backward reaction rate coefficients are determined using a nonlinear least squares fit to the measured binding kinetics, providing considerable physical insight into the factors governing this type of self-assembly process. It is found that the value of the dissociation constant, K d , for the DNA-nanoparticle complex considered here is up to seven orders of magnitude larger than that of the native biotinstreptavidin complex. This difference is attributed to the combined effect that the much larger size of the DNA origami and the quantum dot have on the translational and rotational diffusion constants.

The physics of coherent beams of photons carrying axial orbital angular momentum (OAM) is well understood and such beams, sometimes known as vortex beams, have found applications in optics and microscopy. Recently electron beams carrying very large values of axial OAM have been generated. In the absence of coupling to an external electromagnetic field the propagation of such vortex electron beams is virtually identical mathematically to that of vortex photon beams propagating in a medium with a homogeneous index of refraction. But when coupled to an external electromagnetic field the propagation of vortex electron beams is distinctly different from photons. Here we use the exact path integral solution to Schrodingers equation to examine the time evolution of an electron wave function carrying axial OAM. Interestingly we find that the nonzero OAM wave function can be obtained from the zero OAM wave function, in the case considered here, simply by multipling it by an appropriate time and position dependent prefactor. Hence adding OAM and propagating can in this case be replaced by first propagating then adding OAM. Also, the results shown provide an explicit illustration of the fact that the gyromagnetic ratio for OAM is unity. We also propose a novel version of the Bohm-Aharonov effect using vortex electron beams.