Hexagonal arrays of nanoscale holes or metal dots (25nm in diameter and 39nm in period), with orientational order extending over the entire square-centimeter array area, were fabricated on unpatterned silicon wafer substrates using a shear-aligned sphere-forming diblock copolymer template. Since two or more layers of spherical nanodomains are required to achieve alignment in the block copolymer film, but pattern transfer requires a single layer, a multistep etching process was developed, whereby the top layer of a shear-aligned bilayer was evenly removed, leaving the ordered bottom layer as the fabrication template for hole and dot arrays free from grain boundaries.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.