Collaborative Research: Controlling the Chemistry at the Nanoscale: Parallelization, Robustness, and Registration

纳米制造是制造具有纳米尺度的任意图案的功能结构的过程。为了改进微电子设备和信息技术，纳米制造已经被广泛地商业化实施。然而，传统光刻技术在分辨率、资本和操作成本方面的局限性，以及在可图案化和制造材料方面的有限灵活性，推动了非传统制造方法的发展。扫描探针光刻是一种很有前途的新型制造方法，它利用扫描尖头在材料表面进行纳米级的精细修饰。该奖项支持开发基于热探针的扫描探针光刻方法的基础研究，该方法用于在纳米级对材料的属性进行热化学改变。这项被称为热化学纳米光刻的技术有着广泛的应用，特别是在石墨烯、导电聚合物纳米线、DNA和蛋白质纳米阵列中制造纳米结构。研究工作旨在回答有助于热化学纳米光刻广泛使用的问题，并为学生提供独特的跨学科培训，包括发展材料科学、光谱学、纳米和微制造以及表面科学技术方面的知识。这将使该团队能够增强社区对纳米级工艺的理解，并有可能提供廉价和强大的工具来降低进入纳米光刻图案化的成本。热化学纳米光刻是一种基于原子力显微镜的多功能技术，它可以通过化学修饰的石墨烯的局部热还原来制备类石墨烯材料的纳米结构和纳米带。热化学纳米光刻利用热探头对材料表面进行局部加热，产生各种纳米尺度的化学反应，这些化学反应可以根据空间分辨率和化学转化程度进行控制，从而获得复杂的化学梯度。对于基于类石墨烯材料的下一代电子、传感器和能源纳米器件的应用，该项目旨在解决以下问题：(I)制造尺寸、长度和在任意衬底上的定位(注册表)可控的无缺陷石墨烯纳米带；以及(Ii)对石墨烯和其他材料纳米结构的化学进行纳米尺度控制。研究小组将使用实验、有限元计算和密度泛函理论模拟来了解和控制石墨烯材料的纳米级热化学修饰，以制造高质量的石墨烯纳米带，并对定位和尺寸进行出色的控制。此外，该项目旨在利用温度控制和软件的新概念开发并行(多达100个探头)图案，目标是在1秒内写入和读取100多万个10纳米像素。

Nanofabrication is the process of making functional structures with arbitrary patterns having nanoscale dimensions. Nanofabrication has been widely implemented commercially for improving microelectronic devices and information technology. However, the limitations of conventional lithography techniques in terms of resolution, capital and operational costs, and limited flexibility in terms of materials that can be patterned and fabricated have motivated the development of unconventional fabrication methods. Scanning probe lithography is one of these promising new fabrication methods, and it uses a scanning sharp probe to produce with nanoscale precision modifications on the surface of a material. This award supports fundamental research for the development of a scanning probe lithography method based on hot probes, which are used to thermo-chemically change the properties of a material at the nanoscale. This technology, called thermochemical nanolithography, has a broad range of applications, in particular to fabricate nanostructures in graphene, conductive polymers nanowires, DNA and protein nano-arrays. The research work is geared toward answering questions that can facilitate the wide scale use of thermochemical nanolithography and providing students with a unique interdisciplinary training that includes developing knowledge in materials science, spectroscopy, nano- and micro-fabrication, and surface science techniques. This will enable the team to augment the community's understanding of nanoscale processes and potentially provide inexpensive and robust tools to decrease the cost of entry into nanolithographic patterning. Thermochemical nanolithography is a versatile atomic force microscopy based technique that can be used to fabricate nanostructures and nanoribbons of graphene-like materials via local thermal reduction of chemically modified graphene. Thermochemical nanolithography uses thermal probes to locally heat the surface of a material to produce a variety of nano-scale chemical reactions, which can be controlled in terms of spatial resolution and extent of chemical conversion, so that complex chemical gradients can be obtained. For applications in the next generation of electronic, sensor and energy nano-devices based on graphene-like materials, this project aims to address the following issues: (i) fabrication of defect-free graphene nanoribbons with control over size, length and positioning (registry) on arbitrary substrates; and (ii) nanoscale control of the chemistry of graphene and other materials nanostructures. The research team will use experiments, finite elements calculations and density functional theory simulations for understanding and controlling the nanoscale thermo-chemical modification of graphene-based materials to fabricate graphene nanoribbons of high quality with excellent control over positioning and size. Furthermore, this project aims at developing parallel (up to 100 probes) patterning using novel concepts of temperature control and software, with the goal of writing and then reading more than 1 million 10-nm pixels in 1 second.