Four beams evanescent waves interference lithography for patterning of two dimensional features

Abstract

This work presents a theoretical study of using the interference of multiple counter-propagating evanescent waves as a lithography technique to print periodic two dimensional features. The formulation of the three dimensional Cartesian space expression of an evanescent wave is presented. In this work, the evanescent wave is generated by the total internal reflection of a plane wave at the interface between a incident dielectric material and a weakly absorbing transmission medium. The influences of polarization, incident angle and the phase shifting of the incident plane waves on the evanescent wave interference are studied. Numerical simulation results suggest that this technique enables fabrication of periodic two dimensional features with resolution less than one third the wavelength of the irradiation source.

Plasmonic Nanolithography: A Review

“…And it was demonstrated that the finer experimental results are easy to achieve at smaller incident angle [101]. Using this type of lithography system, 1D patterns using two-beam interference and 2D patterns using four-beam interference have been demonstrated [101][102][103][104][105][106][107][108][109][110][111]. The interferential beams are The plasmonic head flying 20 nm above the rotating substrate.…”

“…The throughput of interference lithography is quite high and the image quality is acceptable. But it is applicable only to periodic and quasiperiodic patterns, which limits its applications [111].…”

Metal Particle-Surface System for Plasmonic Lithography

“…But they have stringent limitations with respect to certain materials and effectiveness applies only for certain ambient conditions. Evanescent wave lithography (EWL) is one of the near field interference lithography technique to achieve nano-scale feature at low cost [Blaikie & McNab, 2001;Chua et al, 2007]. It can create a shorter wavelength intensity pattern in the near field of diffraction grating or prism when two resonantly enhanced, evanescently decaying wave superimposed.…”

Super-Resolution Patterning and Photolithography Based on Surface Plasmon Polaritons

“…The main drawbacks, however, are the drastic increase of complexity and cost for instrumentation and processing, including the developments of new sources, photoresist, and the optical components. Several alternative techniques, such as electron beam lithography [5][6][7][8][9], focused ion beam lithography [10][11][12][13][14], dip-pen lithography [15][16][17][18], and nanoimprint lithography [19][20][21][22], can also achieve nanoscale feature sizes; however, these methods require the introduction of a new infrastructure of tools, materials, and processing technologies, which costs huge expenses.Recently, a new photolithographic scheme, which is based on the unique properties of surface evanescent waves [23][24][25][26] or surface plasmon polaritons (SPPs) [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37] induced at the interface between a metal and a dielectric material, to achieve sub-diffraction-limit nanopatterns was proposed and demonstrated. The wave vector of SPPs can be significantly larger than that of the free-space illuminating light at the same frequency, which results in extraordinary "optical frequency but X-ray wavelength" property.…”