We present and demonstrate a novel imprint method, electrostatic force-assisted nanoimprint lithography (EFAN), where a voltage applied between a mold and a substrate generates an electrostatic force that presses the mold into a resist on the substrate. We have successfully used EFAN to pattern nanostructures in a photocurable resist spin-coated on a wafer, with high fidelity and excellent unif...

Cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death worldwide(1). Cardiac tissue engineering holds much promise to deliver groundbreaking medical discoveries with the aims of developing functional tissues for cardiac regeneration as well as in vitro screening assays. However, the ability to create high-fidelity models of heart tissue has proven difficult. The heart's extracellular matrix ...

Systematic studies on scanning probe lithography (SPL) methodologies have been performed using self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) on Au as examples. The key to achieving high spatial precision is to keep the tip-surface interactions strong and local. Approaches include three atomic force microscopy (AFM) based methods, nanoshaving, nanografting, and nanopen reader and writer (NPRW), which rely on...

Exploring the resolution limit of electron-beam lithography is of great interest both scientifically and technologically. However, when electron-beam lithography approaches its resolution limit, imaging and metrology of the fabricated structures by using standard scanning electron microscopy become difficult. In this work, the authors adopted transmission-electron and atomic-force microscopies ...

The past decade has witnessed an explosion of techniques used to pattern polymers on the nano (1-100 nm) and submicrometre (100-1,000 nm) scale, driven by the extensive versatility of polymers for diverse applications, such as molecular electronics, data storage, optoelectronics, displays, sacrificial templates and all forms of sensors. Conceptually, most of the patterning techniques, including...