An international team of scientists affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center has coaxed a self-assembling material into forming never-before-seen, three-dimensional nanoscale structures, with potential applications ranging from catalysis and chemical separation to semiconductor manufacturing.
The team of scientists has discovered that materials known as block copolymers will spontaneously assemble into intricate 3-D shapes when deposited onto particular 2-D surface patterns created with photolithography.
The result, published in the Jan. 27 issue of Physical Review Letters, demonstrates a promising strategy for building complex, 3-D nanostructures by using standard tools of the semiconductor industry, says Nealey. Those tools, particularly lithography, already allow the making of devices with dimensions substantially smaller than 100 nanometers, or a hundred-thousandth of a centimeter.
But photolithography is also limited, he says, because as practiced today it is essentially a two-dimensional process.
The specific structures the team produced were composed of two tightly interwoven, yet completely independent, networks of channels and passages-all at the scale of atoms.
The networks are also in perfect register with the photolithographic pattern underneath, which tells scientists exactly where each channel ends and gives them ready access to channel openings. A gas, for example, might be introduced through the openings to react with a catalyst deposited on the walls of the network. Nanoscale materials have massive surface areas compared to their volumes; thus, catalysis would be extremely efficient.
The researchers study specific block copolymers consisting of long chains of two different types of molecules, which alternate with each other in blocks. At high temperature, block copolymers are molten and randomly mixed. But when cooled down, the material spontaneously assembles into alternating layers of molecules.
University of Wisconsin-Madison
