| AVS 54th International Symposium | |
| Nanometer-scale Science and Technology | Monday Sessions |
| Session NS-MoM |
| Session: | Nanoscale Assembly and Manipulation I |
| Presenter: | H. Wolf, IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland |
| Authors: | H. Wolf, IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland T. Kraus, IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland L. Malaquin, IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland A. Decker, IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland H. Schmid, IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, Switzerland N.D. Spencer, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Switzerland |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Nanoparticles provide multiple properties that make them potential building blocks of novel optical and electronic devices. Significant progress has been made in the bulk synthesis of nanoparticles with controllable composition, shape, structure, and size. However, in general the products are disordered colloidal suspensions or powders, whereas devices usually require ordered arrangements of particles on a substrate. Self-assembly processes can order large numbers of particles in parallel on surfaces, but they usually provide only dense regular arrays without the long-range order required for large-scale integration. In addition to particle order, also the particle-substrate junction is often crucial for device performance, and the reliable creation of well-defined particle-surface interfaces remains a challenge. We will show in this talk how directed self-assembly can be combined with a transfer step to produce arbitrary patterns of nanoparticles on a substrate. The combined process, called "SATI" for "Self-Assembly, Transfer and Integration", maintains the advantages of self-assembly but relaxes the requirements on the substrates, and is more flexible than single-step self-assembly. Directed self-assembly uses a topographically or chemically patterned template to assemble nanoscale objects. Compared to template-free self-assembly it has less requirements and restrictions with regard to the assembled object. It is not limited to regular patterns but still a highly parallel process. Directed self-assembly comes at the cost of producing a template. However, the template can be re-used or fabricated as a low-cost replica of a topographical master made by standard top-down patterning techniques. After assembly, the nanoscale objects are printed in the transfer and integration steps onto the target substrate, retaining the parallel nature of the process. The transfer requires to tailor adhesion in a way that makes the nanoparticles leave the template or intermediate carrier and stay on the target substrate. Further processing of the arrays allows to exploit the specific particle functionality, e.g. as a catalyst, optical activity, or simply as a resist.