A Nanopatterning Technique: DUV Interferometry of a Reactive Plasma Polymer

Recently, great emphasis has been placed on the fabrication of chemical and topographical functional materials on both the micrometer and nanometer scale, due to novel phenomena that occur at this scale. Most techniques reported to date suffer from the ability to satisfy the different material requirements and makes it difficult to reproduce both topographical patterns with a wide range of well defined structures and chemical patterns with well defined geometries. Furthermore, the size of the patterns depends on the technique utilized and can often vary between the micrometer to the sub-10 nanometer length scale (Fig. 1). One successful technique that has been utilized for functional surfaces is plasma polymerization. This technique allows the plasma-chemical surface functionalization step to be independent of the substrate, good adhesion of plasma polymer thin films with most substrates, surface density of immobilized molecular species to be finely tuned when the pulsed plasma duty cycle is varied and can be easily scaled to meet the required industrial dimension. In fact, maleic anhydride pulsed plasma polymerization has been well developed and used in numerous applications. These films have been useful because they readily undergo ring opening forming diacids after hydrolysis or reaction of amine functionalized molecule via aminolysis reaction (Fig. 2). The study by Olivier Soppera from the Département de Photochimie Génèrale and his colleagues at the Institut de Chimie des Surfaces et Interfaces, Université de HauteAlsace in France, has taken plasma polymerization to another level and demonstrated a new approach for patterning solid surfaces with reactive groups by utilizing the maleic anhydride pulsed plasma polymerization technique. According to Soppera, an excimer laser was successfully used to address the surface patterning for lengths ranging from tens of micrometers to tens of nanometers. ‘‘The DUV lithography based on an interferometric approach allows a fast patterning on a large surface area (few cm). In addition, this is a versatile technique since the fringe Substrate Substrate