Sub-wavelength metal nanostructure fabrication by parallel dip-pen nanolithography

Metal nanostructures at sub-wavelength scale have been used as plasmonic diffraction gratings and negative index metamaterials and have attracted interests in materials engineering and optics research. E-beam lithography is commonly used to fabricate these metal nanostructures; however, e-beam lithography has limitation in scale-up of nanostructure fabrication and is expensive. In this study, a low cost and convenient scale-up fabrication method for metal nanostructures using Dip Pen Nanolithography ® (DPN ® ) is demonstrated. DPN was used to deposit alkanethiol patterns, which were then used as etch resists for top-down nanofabrication processes to generate Au nano-features. As a proof of concept, arrays of three different designed double-ring Split-Ring Resonators (SRRs) were fabricated by DPN printing.