Surface plasmon assisted contact scheme nanoscale photolithography using an UV lamp

In this article, we present our study on surface plasmon SP assisted contact scheme nanoscale photolithography technique. Sub-100-nm features on a metallic mask, fabricated by e-beam lithography, were successfully transferred to a resist pattern in a setup close to traditional photolithography. Our previous work based on finite difference time domain simulation reveals the mechanism of SP-light coupling in the transferring and confining of light in surface plasmon assisted nanolithography SPAN , which was demonstrated using 355 nm laser light. In this article, we extended our SPAN work to the use of UV light from a mercury lamp, which emits broadband, unpolarized, and incoherent light. Our experimental results show that sub-100-nm features can still be easily transferred using SPAN despite the light source used, proving SPAN to be an alternative nanopatterning technique that is simple, quick, and inexpensive. The experiments also showed interesting SP interference effects at the boundary of the mask. © 2008 American Vacuum Society. DOI: 10.1116/1.2834688