Three-dimensional deep sub-diffraction optical beam lithography with 9 nm feature size

Abstract

The current nanofabrication techniques including electron beam lithography provide fabrication resolution in the nanometre range. The major limitation of these techniques is their incapability of arbitrary three-dimensional nanofabrication. This has stimulated the rapid development of far-field three-dimensional optical beam lithography where a laser beam is focused for maskless direct writing. However, the diffraction nature of light is a barrier for achieving nanometre feature and resolution in optical beam lithography. Here we report on three-dimensional optical beam lithography with 9 nm feature size and 52 nm two-line resolution in a newly developed two-photon absorption resin with high mechanical strength. The revealed dependence of the feature size and the two-line resolution confirms that they can reach deep sub-diffraction scale but are limited by the mechanical strength of the new resin. Our result has paved the way towards portable three-dimensional maskless laser direct writing with resolution fully comparable to electron beam lithography.

Optical storage arrays: a perspective for future big data storage

“…39 Recently, a photopolymerizable material with improved photosensitivity and mechanical stability has been developed and successfully applied in using the SPIN method for the fabrication of suspended lines with the smallest feature size down to 9 nm, or l/42. 20 These exceptional features open a new avenue toward diffraction-unlimited laser fabrication, as well as for the development of ultrahigh-density optical memory.…”

“…Table 1 summarizes the state of the art of SPIN-based super-resolution recording methods for the production of ultrafine features. In general, photoinduction can refer to any photoinduced chemical or physical processes that initiate a change in material properties, such as photochromism, 39 photopolymerization 20 and photoreduction, 48 and that can also be terminated by an inhibition beam operating at a different wavelength. As such, the photochromism process has been used to inhibit photoabsorption, and the smallest line-feature size of 30 nm (approximately one-tenth of the wavelength l) has been successfully demonstrated.…”

“…As such, studies based on the new photonic principles have led to the development of artificial materials with negative refractive indices, [10][11][12] nano-optical circuits, 13,14 nanoscale light-emitting sources, 15,16 imaging beyond the diffraction limit [17][18][19] and superresolution optical lithography. 20,21 These studies have laid the physical groundwork for the confinement of light-matter interactions to the nanometer scale, which paves the way toward breaking or circumventing the diffraction barrier and thus increasing storage capacity by using entirely new nanophotonic approaches.…”

Plasmonic Color Filters as Dual‐State Nanopixels for High‐Density Microimage Encoding

“…Recent developments in the engineering and manipulation of materials on the nanoscale have given rise to a number of new techniques with the potential for physically encoding data and images into optically readable volumes and surfaces. [23,24] Using semiconductor quantum dots, [25][26][27] graphene, [28] and various super-resolution lithography techniques, [29][30][31][32][33][34] researchers are demonstrating novel 2D and 3D techniques that may enable the next generation of optical storage and encoding technologies. Plasmonic particles and filters have also seen applications in these research areas, with the aforementioned image encoding examples having been joined by demonstrations of their use in optical data storage.…”

In-channel integration of designable microoptical devices using flat scaffold-supported femtosecond-laser microfabrication for coupling-free optofluidic cell counting

“…Two-photon polymerization (TPP) [11][12][13][14][15] based on laser direct writing is a powerful technology for the fabrication of flexible 3D structures in a controllable manner with high precision (,100 nm) by point-to-point scanning. This method has been used to integrate various 3D functional microdevices, [16][17][18][19][20] such as a microfilters, 16 mixers 18 or overpasses, 19 into a 2D microchannel for controllable filtering of particles, high-efficiency mixing of different solvents, and guiding of different fluids and cell migration, respectively.…”