Regensburg 2013 – scientific programme

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DS: Fachverband Dünne Schichten

DS 18: Micro- and Nanopatterning (jointly with O)

DS 18.4: Talk

Wednesday, March 13, 2013, 10:15–10:30, H8

Selective deposition of nanospheres in trenches on silicon surfaces by self-organisation — •Katharina Brassat and Jörg K. N. Lindner — University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

The self-organisation of nanospheres on surfaces has been extensively studied in the last decades, as it allows for the simple and cost-effective creation of regular arrays of nano-objects such as metallic nanodots. These can be achieved by nanosphere lithography (NSL), i.e. deposition of a metal through a monolayer of nanospheres acting as a mask. Various techniques have been invented to create nanosphere monolayers as a first step of NSL. In the present work, we use the spreading knife technique as a fast and well controllable large area convective self-assembly technique in order to form chains of nanospheres sitting in a linear trench on a pre-patterned silicon surface. The goal is to use these templates as a deposition mask, by which linear chains of opposing metallic nanotips can be formed. Optical lithography and reactive ion etching (RIE) are used to form trenches on Si(100) wafers whose shape, depth and width are subsequently investigated by confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM). Using the spreading knife technique, polystyrene (PS) spheres with a diameter of 2.1 *m are assembled exclusively inside the trenches. This is achieved by optimisation of process parameters and functionalisation of the silicon surface with amphiphilic agent octadecyltrichlorsilane (OTS) which forms a self-assembled molecular monolayer (SAM). By this, linear chains of tangent PS-spheres with a length of up to 0.5 mm are obtained and can be used as a deposition mask.