Nanopattening by using self-assemblies of block copolymers and colloidal particles

Abstract

The fabrication of patterned surface with a designed two dimensional (2D) arrangement have attracted great attention because of potential importance for its applications to microelectronic and optoelectronic and magnetic recording devices, biochips and sensors, and photonic bandgap materials. Various fabrication methods have been applied to many patterned surfaces including soft-lithography such as microcontact printing, replica molding, and nanoimprinting, conventional and advanced lithographic techniques including extreme ultraviolet, E-beam, X-ray, and ion beam lithography. Although these lithographic techniques based on "top-down approach" are very useful in pattern fabrication for submicron-scale patterns, they are limited in cost and processing time. Self-assembly methods by means of a chemical or physical driving forces based on the "bottom-up approach" are alternative methods in the simple control of the pattern size and low-cost parallel processes, which use the porous alumina, amphiphilic molecules, and colloidal particles. However, the disadvantages of self-assembly methods are their low ability to control the defects and shapes of the structures and difficulty to fabricate designed structures. In this work, cost-effective hybrid fabrication processes have been developed to fabricate designed patterns using soft lithography in combination with the self-assembly of colloidal particles and block copolymers. Versatile nanopatterns were fabricated by soft lithography, block copolymer lithography, colloidal lithography, and their combined techniques such as a particle-assisted soft lithography and a soft and block copolymer lithography. In chapter 2, the nanopattern of magnetic metal dot arrays with domains of periodicity about 20 nm were fabricated by using block copolymer templates. 2D hybrid patterns with the feature resolution from micrometer to nanometer scale were fabricated by using soft lithography and block copolymer lithogra...