The current nanofabrication techniques including electron beam lithography provide fabrication resolution in the nanometre range. The major limitation of these techniques is their incapability of arbitrary three-dimensional nanofabrication. This has stimulated the rapid development of far-field three-dimensional optical beam lithography where a laser beam is focused for maskless direct writing. However, the diffraction nature of light is a barrier for achieving nanometre feature and resolution in optical beam lithography. Here we report on three-dimensional optical beam lithography with 9 nm feature size and 52 nm two-line resolution in a newly developed two-photon absorption resin with high mechanical strength. The revealed dependence of the feature size and the two-line resolution confirms that they can reach deep sub-diffraction scale but are limited by the mechanical strength of the new resin. Our result has paved the way towards portable three-dimensional maskless laser direct writing with resolution fully comparable to electron beam lithography. © 2013 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved.
CITATION STYLE
Gan, Z., Cao, Y., Evans, R. A., & Gu, M. (2013). Three-dimensional deep sub-diffraction optical beam lithography with 9 nm feature size. Nature Communications, 4. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms3061
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