The application of shadow nanosphere lithography for the preparation of large-area, two-dimensional, metallic nanostructures of different shape is described. Through changing the mask morphology by temperature processing and varying the evaporation conditions, particles with morphologies such as rings, rods, and dots have been produced. This process allows outstanding control of the size and morphology of the particles. The efficient technique is shown to scale down the size of metallic nanoparticles from 200 to 30 nm, while preserving the original nanosphere spacing and order. The 150-nm-diameter Fe rings produced by this method show ferromagnetic behavior, which was predicted by theoretical simulation. All the experimental results were confirmed by computer simulations, which also showed the possibility of creating periodic arrays of any other geometrical shape.

In this letter we describe the preparation of large-area, two-dimensional metallic structures using shadow nanosphere lithography. By varying the position of the substrate with respect to the evaporation source during the sample preparation, we make morphologies such as cups, rods, and wires, that are not accessible by the standard nanosphere lithography. This technique also allows for an encapsulation of the metallic structures, to prevent them from oxidation. Morphologies predicted by our computer simulations have been subsequently confirmed experimentally.

A fast and cheap, large-area (>1 cm(2)), high-coverage fabrication technique for periodic metallic split-ring resonator metamaterials is presented, which allows control of inner- and outer-ring diameters, gap angles, as well as thickness and periodicity. This method, based on shadow nanosphere lithography, uses tilted-angle-rotation thermal evaporation onto Langmuir-Blodgett-type monolayers of close-packed polystyrene nanospheres. Excellent agreement of the process parameters with a simplified model is demonstrated. Pronounced, tunable optical metamaterial resonances in the range of 100 THz are consistent with simulations.