Scanning probe with an integrated diamond heater element for nanolithography

Abstract

This letter reports the microfabrication, evaluation, and application of a boron-doped diamond microprobe with an integrated resistive heater element. The diamond heater with a pyramidal tip, which is formed at the end of two diamond beams, can be electrically heated by a flowing current. The high thermal conductivity of the diamond base supporting the heater element allows very quick thermal response of 0.45 μs. A hard-wearing sharp diamond tip formed by the silicon-lost mold technique shows excellent durability in contact operation with a sample. Diamond is well suited to use as a nanolithography tool for modification of a polymer, because polymer is hard to deposit on the tip during scanning due to the chemical inertness of the diamond surface. Demonstration of thermomechanical nanolithography with this heated probe exhibits line patterns with the feature size of 40 nm on a poly(methylmethacrylate) film.

Exploiting Chemical Switching in a Diels–Alder Polymer for Nanoscale Probe Lithography and Data Storage

“…This has been demonstrated in schemes for thermomechanical writing that use a combination of heat and force to press a heated, sharp tip into a polymer surface, creating a plastic deformation. [2,6,9,10] The heated tip causes very local heating of the polymer material above its softening temperature, which effectively acts as the switch to turn on the writing process. [11] Although linear polymers exhibit such switching behavior above and below the glass-transition temperature (T g ), [6] they do not satisfy the other device requirements, especially stability to the repeated motion of surface scanning during imaging (e.g., reading).…”

Three-Dimensional Lithography Using Combination of Nanoscale Processing and Wet Chemical Etching

“…However, the etch rate was nearly constant in the removal region owing to the dislocations formed by the removal machining at higher normal loads. The dislocations enhanced the silicon etching in KOH [22]. Therefore, a constant etch rate at the removal region resulted from the interaction between the amorphous phase (etch stop effect) and dislocation (etching enhancement effect) formed by the machining.…”

“…Additionally, threedimensional structures can be fabricated by controlling the etching mask. Herein we describe a method of three-dimensional fabrication using TNL [19,[22][23][24][25][26][27][28] with wet chemical etching.…”

“…SPM lithography can be used to fabricate nanoscale structures by various methods such as electrochemical oxidation [9][10][11], material transfer [12][13][14], mechanical removal [15][16][17][18][19] and thermal reaction [21,22]. This technique is effective for fabricating nanometer-scale structures.…”

Variability of silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) cones – variability structure of scale surface area

“…since the invention of transmission electron microscope, this method has become the main technique allowing materials and structures to be observed at the atomic level (aleszkiewicz 1998;Barbacki 2007). it is used in materials and metallurgy engineering, among others, in studies of tribological wear, corrosion damage, the quality control of materials (Klimek 2013;Kuźnia et al 2012;Pashechko et al 2011), biology and medicine in determining intracellular structures and processes (Kocoń 1986, Krajewski 1992Bae et al 2003;Świercz et al 2014), as well as in zoological research, the identification of chemical substances and investigative techniques.…”