Skip to main content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.

Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( ) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

FIB Nanofabrication Employing High Resolution and Stable Gallium and New Ion Species

There are applications whereby Focused Ion Beam (FIB) nanofabrication can "win the race" against Electron Beam Lithography (EBL) in first delivering the answers to important questions in nanoscale science and engineering. FIB can have significant advantages over EBL, like direct, resistless, and three-dimensional patterning. Although a FIB-centric nanofabrication process can sometimes be slower than a resist-accelerated EBL-centric nanofabrication process, an increasing number of FIB applications can be found over the last ten years, based on FIB systems and combined FIB-SEM microscopes upgraded with nanolithography add-on packages, and more recently from the ionLINE, a unique dedicated FIB nanofabrication instrument. Such FIB applications are motivated by the relative simplification of the overall nanofabrication process as compared to that of EBL, especially for the direct processing at the nanometer scale of novel materials for which EBL processes have yet to be developed, or any materials for which EBL processes do not exist or are otherwise difficult to access. The FIB nanofabrication applications are wide-ranging, from nanophotonics and plasmonics to nanofluidics and nanopores. With the appreciation that the ion's properties can have dramatic consequences on the physical and chemical nature of the resulting nanostructures, we also discuss the motivations behind applications employing either Gallium or non-Gallium species, such as Beryllium, Silicon, Gold, and clusters.

Sponsors

henri.lezec [at] nist.gov (Henri Lezec), 301-975-8612

Jason E. Sanabia, Ph.D.

President & CEO, Raith America, Inc.and

Joseph Klingfus, Ph.D.

Applications Scientist, Raith America, Inc.
Created March 25, 2015, Updated May 13, 2016