Encapsulated conducting probes that can sustain high currents are used to study the nanoscale properties of thin-film stacks comprising of a phase-change chalcogenide, Ge(2)Sb(2)Te(5). Scaling studies on this promising candidate for random-access memory devices had thus far required extensive lithography and nanoscale growth. This seriously hampers rapid materials characterization. This article...

The resputtering of gold films from nano-holes defined in a sacrificial PMMA mask, which was made by electron beam lithography, was carried out with a dry plasma etching tool in order to form well-like structures with a high aspect ratio (height/width ≈ 3-4) at the rims of the nano-holes. The extraordinary transmission through the patterns of such nano-wells was investigated experimentally and ...

Nanoimprint lithography (NIL) has overcome the limitation of light diffraction. It is capable of printing features less than 10nm in size with high lithographic resolution, high manufacturing speed, and low production cost. The uniformity of pressure, however, remains a critical issue. To improve the uniformity of pressure, we developed a flexible uniform pressure component based on Pascal’s La...

The ability of insulating materials to trap charges is a phenomenon of interest in many technological fields such as information storage, electron beam lithography and formation of electrets for instance. However, charge-trapping characteristics are not well understood in spite of a large amount of studies carried out mainly by scanning electron microscopy (SEM) [1,2] and more recently by atomi...

We present the fabrication process of a tool that can be used in standard atomic force microscope (AFM) for in situ characterization of chemical, chemical–mechanical or physical surface modification performed with the same device. The image obtained during scanning contains information about the modified and unmodified topographies for each scanning line, thus quantification of surface topograp...

Advances in lithography have contributed significantly to the advancement of the integrated circuit technology. While nonoptical next-generation lithography (NGL) solutions are being developed, optical lithography continues to be the workhorse for high-throughput very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) lithography. Extending optical lithography to the resolution levels necessary to support today’s a...

Quantum dots (QDs) were immobilized on an ultra-flat Au surface by using amide binding between the carboxyl groups on the QDs and the amino groups of the self-assembled monolayer on the surface. The number density of the QDs estimated by atomic force microscopy (AFM) agreed with the quantity of QDs estimated by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and fluorescence microscopy. QDs were also immobili...

Controlled preparation of inorganic nanostructures on substrates is very important for various applications of functional inorganic nanomaterials. Dip-pen nanolithography (DPN), as an atomic force microscopy (AFM) based technique, can directly fabricate nanostructures with precise position and morphology control on the nanometer scale and meanwhile image the produced nanostructures in situ at h...

A novel technique to lithograph the MoS2 surface is described here. Mechanically exfoliated MoS2 flakes have been patterned with an atomic force microscope tip. After the patterning process, the lithographed areas have been removed by selective chemical etching. The electronic properties of the MoS2 flakes have been analyzed with spatially resolved photoelectron spectroscopy, with tunable incid...

Ordered SnO₂ nanostructures were prepared as humidity sensors by nanosphere lithography with the magnetron sputtering technique. The X-ray diffraction patterns of SnO₂ nanostructures show that all intense diffraction peaks correspond to the crystallographic planes of SnO₂. The Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) mage shows that these SnO₂ nanostructures exhibited a classic honeycomb structure. The re...