Advanced Nanopatterning Group

The group strives to advance nanopatterning technologies to push the top-down lithography resolution towards nanometer gap regime as well as the directed self-assembly fabrication towards accurate depositions of various functional nanoparticles. Relying on these key nanopatterning capabilities, the group is focused on designing and fabricating various miniaturized functional devices, such as plasmonic-thermoelectric detectors, superconducting devices, miniaturized spectrometers with wide bandwidth spanning from ultraviolet, visible, to mid-IR. The group currently holds both scientific and industry research grants, such as A*STAR Individual Research Grant (IRG), A*STAR Career Development Award (CDA) and DSO RCA research project.

Currently, we have the following key technologies:

• Sub-10-nm lithography with accurate alignment capability (ACS Nano 2018, 12, 8616 & Nano Letters 2019, 19, 8040)
• Template stripping method to fabricate small nanogaps with ultra-smooth surfaces (Nano Letters 2015, 15, 5976)
• Directed self-assembly to deposit various functional nanoparticles accurately (ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2019, 11, 45207)

Figure 1: Scanning electron micrograph (SEM) images of fabricated samples by Advanced Nanopatterning group. (a) State-of-the-art electron beam lithography (EBL) technology for the extreme high-resolution nanofabrication down to 5 nm gap regime. (b) Nanofabrication of hybrid Si-Au nanoantenna with sub‑5‑nm alignment accuracy. (c) Scalable template stripping method to fabricate ultra-smooth Au film with 9-nm gaps for enhancing the optical characteristics of monolayer WSe2. (d)-(f) Directed self-assembly approach to deposit single nanoparticles accurately and to fabricate 1-2 nm gaps.