Highly efficient and controllable method to fabricate ultrafine metallic nanostructures

Abstract

We report a highly efficient, controllable and scalable method to fabricate various ultrafine metallic nanostructures in this paper. The method starts with the negative poly-methyl-methacrylate (PMMA) resist pattern with line-width superior to 20 nm, which is obtained from overexposing of the conventionally positive PMMA under a low energy electron beam. The pattern is further shrunk to sub-10 nm line-width through reactive ion etching. Using the patter as a mask, we can fabricate various ultrafine metallic nanostructures with the line-width even less than 10 nm. This ion tailored mask lithography (ITML) method enriches the top-down fabrication strategy and provides potential opportunity for studying quantum effects in a variety of materials.