Defining the zerogap: cracking along the photolithographically defined Au–Cu–Au lines with sub-nanometer precision

Abstract Cracks are formed along the photolithographically pre-determined lines with extremely high yield and repeatability, when Cu clusters introduced between planarized Au thin films sequentially deposited on a PET substrate. These act as nanometer-sized spacers preventing formation of contiguous metallic bond adjacent layers which will render prepatterned-cracking impossible. While effective gap width is initially zero in optical sense from microwaves all way to visible, outer-bending substrate allows tuning into 100 nm range, stability controllability ranges s Angstrom-scale, respectively. It anticipated that our wafer-scale prepatterned crack technology an unprecedented mixture macroscopic length Angstrom-scale open-up many applications optoelectronics, quantum photonics photocatalysis.